Eight days in a hospital hallway: Health-care system getting worse, not better says Nova Scotia woman’s family

Gail Wagner says Nova Scotia’s health-care system is a mess, and something needs to be done.

She and her sister were shocked last week that their mother was still lying on a bed in the hallway of Dartmouth General Hospital, eight days after being admitted.

Wagner’s sister had posted about her 64-year-old mother’s plight on Facebook. Someone gave her a number for Nova Scotia Health’s patient care unit, but when someone called back, Wagner, said, they seemed more concerned that the post included images that might identify other patients also in the hallway than what their mother was going through.

Wagner told her sister to edit the photos to remove anything that might identify the other people, but said they were not about to remove the post because the family wants people to know how bad the health-care system in the province has become.

“It’s funny, they’re worried about a Facebook post, but how many people were walking by and could see my mother sleeping or having to be taken into another patient’s room to use the washroom,” Wagner said.

“This is absolutely ridiculous. You see so many stories like this, it’s not just my mother being treated that way.”

She said her mother went to the Cobequid Community Health Centre on Sept. 6 and was admitted because she had a bursitis infection in her elbow that developed into sepsis. She was moved to Dartmouth the next day.

It was eight days before she was moved into a room.

Wagner couldn’t visit because she had a cold, but her sister could.

“My sister went in and raised a stink, but tried not to be nasty or cranky with the nurses because they’re doing everything they can. But at the same, how do you leave someone that long in the hallway?”

Wagner said the antibiotics needed for the infection make her mother nauseous, and she told her daughters that she “felt like giving up” because she felt so miserable in the situation.

Her belongings were in a shopping bag on the floor at the end of the bed, and she had a teacher’s handbell to ring if she needed anything or had to go to the washroom, but she was so far from the nurses station that sometimes it wasn’t heard.

“The nurses are so overworked and understaffed, so patient care is being jeopardized by a lack of nursing,” Wagner said. “They’re trying to do their best.”

She said the government may be saying that health care in the province is getting better, but she doesn’t see it that way.

“I absolutely would not agree,” she said. “I would not.”

Wagner’s mother was in hospital four years ago for an infection as well, but things were different at that time, she said.

“Her care was so different from now,” she said, and adding that the health-care system is worse now than it was then.

She said the government “needs to be spending more on doctors and nurses and trying to relieve the stress that nurses are working under now.”

Last week, the province announced a $116-million surplus for the 2022-23 fiscal year.

“That would help,” Wagner said.

She said if there are other health-care facilities that are operating under-capacity, patients should be moved to those sites until a bed opens up for them.

While all acute-care hospitals in the Central and Western zones were at or above 100 per cent acute-care occupancy Monday, a handful in the other zones were at between 60 and 80 per cent, according to the province’s daily online dashboard.

While Wagner’s mother is in a room now, she will need home care for a few weeks after she is cleared to go home.

“That’s another thing… I feel like they need to find someone and I think that’s somewhere that there are staff shortages as well,” Wagner said.

In an emailed statement, Nova Scotia Health spokesman John Gillis said the organization acknowledges that wait times for inpatient beds at the Dartmouth hospital “have been longer than they should be and understand how difficult those waits can be on patients.”

He said one of the things NSH does when that happens is to move admitted patients out of emergency department beds into inpatient unit hallways to ensure there is capacity for emergency department patients.

“We try to limit the time patients spend in hallways. Every effort is made to ensure patient safety is not compromised by placing patients in hallways,” Gillis wrote. “Patients with higher needs and supervision are prioritized for empty inpatient beds when they become available. As such, if a person can be safely managed in a hallway, then the bed will go to a patient needing a higher level of care.”

He said NSH regularly review available beds at outlying sites and transfers appropriate patients when beds are available.

As to the call about the social media post, he said patient privacy “is of utmost importance to us. When there is a breach of privacy we make every effort to ensure it is mitigated as quickly as possible.”