COVID-19 pressures push some N.S. hospitals past patient capacity

Nova Scotia Health says some hospitals across the province are exceeding their patient capacity and have occasionally had no room for new admissions.

The system's overall capacity was at 104 per cent on Tuesday and the province said pressure from COVID-19 patients led to one emergency department closing on Monday.

Brett MacDougall, executive director of health services for the eastern zone, said some smaller hospitals were still able to take on new patients, but other facilities have gone to unusual lengths to create new capacity.

He said the zone, which includes parts of Antigonish and Guysborough counties and all of Cape Breton Island, was at 95 per cent capacity on Wednesday.

"The number does fluctuate, so any given day, we can be near or over the capacity of the medical and surgical beds," MacDougall said.

Hospitals were nearing 100% capacity last month

At the start of January, Nova Scotia Health said COVID-19 cases provincewide were pushing hospitals toward 100 per cent capacity.

The province has already delayed some surgeries and procedures to deal with rising case counts in the community and among health-care staff during the pandemic.

Temporary emergency room closures have become increasingly common due to staff shortages, but officials had to take the unusual step of closing the Strait Richmond Hospital's ER on Monday because it was full.

Nova Scotia Health said that is rare. The only other time it has happened in the past year was at Guysborough Memorial Hospital in August.

After Monday night's closure due to patient capacity, the Strait Richmond emergency department remained closed Tuesday and Wednesday due to a lack of physician availability, but was scheduled to reopen Thursday morning.

MacDougall said other hospitals lately have had to move beds, departments and patients around to make room.

How hospitals are responding

St. Martha's Regional Hospital in Antigonish is one example where "we've had anywhere between 10 and sometimes 18 patients in non-traditional care spaces," he said.

"That would be beds that we'd usually not use for medical or surgical patients. So we may be into our ambulatory care department or some women's and children's health beds, because the other medical and surgical beds are at 100 per cent capacity."

At Cape Breton Regional Hospital in Sydney, one department was physically relocated within the hospital to make more room and the entire ambulatory care department was moved to Glace Bay Memorial Hospital.

MacDougall said some patients have even faced transfers to other facilities to open up beds.

"Moving patients across the zone or across the entire province would have probably not been something that we would have considered maybe in the past as much, but it's certainly something we've had to respond with," he said.

MacDougall said it is unclear when unusual patient transfers will stop, or when staff and patients will no longer have to travel to different hospitals to make room for people to be treated in their home communities.

Updated modelling numbers expected soon

The province did some modelling last month to try to predict patient numbers, but new data is not expected until next week at the earliest, he said.

"Hopefully, as we get through the next several weeks, we'll see at least the volume of COVID patients hopefully decrease and then maybe if we can get some staffing levels back up a little bit to our more normal operations, we may see some of the occupancy pressure go down," he said.

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