Hospital patients transferred to Watson Lake

With the Whitehorse General Hospital bursting at the seams, the need to find more long-term health facilities is even more pressing, says local physician Wayne MacNicol.

With the Whitehorse General Hospital bursting at the seams, the need to find more long-term health facilities is even more pressing, says local physician Wayne MacNicol.

MacNicol told Health Minister Glenn Hart during Friday’s annual general meeting of the Yukon Medical Association that using the hospital to provide long-term care will only clog up the acute and emergency care system.

In fact, Whitehorse General has been forced to move three patients to the Watson Lake Hospital to free up beds in Whitehorse.

Dr. Graham Henderson, chief of staff at Whitehorse General, explained in an interview Friday afternoon the hospital provides 49 beds normally, though there was a need recently to bump capacity up to 58.

Henderson said as of last Thursday, all the beds were full, but only two or three were taken up by patients suffering from the flu. The rest were used to provide for typical emergency and acute care needs arising from vehicle collisions and the like.

Hospital spokeswoman Val Pike said this morning the number of patients was back down to 50 as of midnight last night.

Two patients were flown by medevac aircraft to Watson Lake over the weekend and another was scheduled to leave today, she said.

Pike said the hospital and the Department of Health and Social Services agreed using the Watson Lake hospital was the preferred solution because there are beds free there and Watson Lake has the staff to manage the overflow, she said.

The one drawback, said Pike, is removing the patients from their local support network, if they have one here, but they and their families are fully apprised of what’s happening before they leave.

She said the increase in demand is being met by using beds that are not normally required for overnight patients, like the beds in the same-day surgery ward.

Patients, Pike emphasized, are not being stacked up in the hallway.

Hart said his department is in the midst of an assessment to determine what would be required to open up a wing of 10 to 12 beds in the Thomson Centre, which is attached to the hospital.

The centre is being used for the hospital’s therapy clinic and diabetes education, and some office space for hospital staff, though there are no patients in the building.

The centre opened in 1992 as a long-term care facility but was closed to patient care in the late 1990s because of serious deficiencies in construction.

Earlier this year, the minister pointed out, the department opened up the wing of 12 long-term beds at the Copper Ridge Place facility. Copper Ridge Place has 96 beds, while there are a total of 151 right across the Yukon.

But with the average age in the Yukon increasing, the pressure on long-term health care facilities will also increase, Hart predicted.

Opening up space in the Thomson Centre is not without challenges, he said, adding there are physically no beds there to begin with.

Hart also mentioned the doors to the washrooms in the individual rooms are not wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs.

“We’re doing an assessment right now to see what is required to upgrade that facility and put it into use,” Hart told the doctors. “We are seeing what we can do to accommodate 10 to 12 beds.”