Whitehorse General Hospital is turning surgery patients away at the door due to lack of bed space, according to a surgeon, who is calling for immediate action from the government.

“As I mentioned to (Premier Darrell) Pasloski, we just had a total knee (replacement operation) cancelled because of no beds,” general surgeon Dr. David Storey said last Friday afternoon.

“And my point for Mr. Pasloski is it’s not a problem for the future; it’s a problem for now.”

The hospital has 16 beds available to recovering surgery patients, the veteran local surgeon noted.

But the vast majority of these have been occupied for the past several weeks by long-term care patients — residents in chronic care, palliative care “and people who need to be in a facility like a nursing home.

“Two beds for 35,000 people’s surgical needs,” Storey said in an interview. “We’re stymied.”

The government and the Yukon Hospital Corp. said they are attuned to the growing number of long-term care patients — now spilling over onto surgical beds — and have several solutions on the go.

“We recognize that there is an increasing need, that it’s not going to go away, because we are dealing with the baby boom that’s now starting to reach that age,” said Pat Living, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Social Services.

The territory has four long-term care facilities — three of them in Whitehorse and one in Dawson City.

“It’s not necessarily health care or medical care that’s required, it’s assistance with the activities of daily living,” Living said.

“We are working daily with the Yukon Hospital Corp. to monitor bed use and availability of beds,” she said.

Living noted accommodation for long-term care patients is an issue across the country, comparing bed availability in the territory to other provinces: “What we have been very fortunate to have is avoiding having patients in the hallways.”

Jason Bilsky, the hospital corporation’s CEO, said only three elective surgery patients have been turned away at the last-minute in the past six months — roughly 0.3 per cent of Yukoners voluntarily going under the knife.

“There’s always a good reason for doing that, usually for the patient’s safety,” Bilsky said. “We wouldn’t want to do anything that could jeopardize their recovery like not having beds at the ready.”

Storey said he has asked about installing beds in space supposedly available in the Thomson Centre, next to the hospital.

“The answer is always no money and no personnel. I tried to portray that it’s urgent; that we need that money and personnel, not in three months or in 2016, when they’re planning to open these other facilities; we need it next week,” Storey said.

Bilsky saw otherwise.

“Whatever type of care space could go in there, it takes either a medium amount of renovation or a very significant amount of renovation,” he said.

“It’s not just a flick of the switch.”

The Thomson Centre currently houses a diabetes education centre, clinical dietitians and rehabilitation services as well as the Yukon Women’s Clinic and staff and surgeon’s offices.

“We will be constructing a new long-term care facility in the future,” Living said on behalf of the Health department.

The territory’s home care services branch is also expanding, she added.

The government announced last July it would move ahead with a $72-million hospital expansion, now underway, that includes a new emergency department, shell space for more beds and an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) program.

The expansion does not include a minor-procedure operating room, which Storey has called for, for cases like endoscopies.

“We do, I believe, 800 colonoscopies a year, and that’s a huge amount of time that we’re wasting in our operating room,” Storey stated.

He said those types of day-care procedures could be done elsewhere, freeing up time and space for more complicated operations.

“Some people make sarcastic remarks about getting ATCO trailers out there. Believe me, I would work in an ATCO trailer,” Storey said.

Arriving in the Yukon in 1974, he recalled, the beds in that era’s Whitehorse hospital – which had been built in the 1950s – totalled 110, versus 55 today.

Storey noted the administrative staff has ballooned from around around 15 to more than 200, while the number of nurses has barely budged.

“And in those days, we’d keep people overnight in most cases (after surgery). Today, we’re sending them walking wounded home, honestly, with drains and everything else — sketchy situation — so that we can do the cases the next day,” Storey said.

“I think it’s a tragedy that we have been — and we have been — sending people from Whitehorse to Watson Lake and Dawson, where they have sometimes no relatives or people to care for them because we have no beds here,” he continued.

“Just think of how you’d feel if that was your mom, if she was in palliative care.”

The knee surgery patient recently turned away had made childcare arrangements at home and received guests from Ontario who were planning to stay throughout the recovery process.

The would-be patient had even fasted the morning of to prepare for the operation, only to be sent home — months after booking the procedure.

“It was cancelled because of no beds. That’s how critical it is,” Storey said.

“There’s an urgency that seems to be mired down in platitudes and bureaucracy and ongoing studies.”

The two-storey Whitehorse General Hospital renovation is slated to include 17 treatment spaces on a 2,200-square-metre (23,700 sq. ft.) footprint along the east side of the current building, cutting into the parking lot.

Above it will sit a slightly smaller space with 10 new in-patient beds. How exactly those beds will be used is not yet determined.

“This expansion is all about ensuring that we can sustain our ability to provide safe and excellent care today and well into the future,” Craig Tuton, chair of the hospital corporation’s board of trustees, said last July.

“It’s big,” he added. The new facilities will take up 4,200 square metres in total – more than half the floor space of the local Canadian Tire store.

Tuton said the additional in-patient beds can’t come soon enough.

“Today, as we speak, the pressure on our beds everyday is close to that hundred per cent.”

The current hospital complex, built 20 years ago, was assigned far fewer general in-patient beds than its predecessor, which opened in 1959.

A Yukon population that is both growing and aging has combined to put new strains on the health care system.

By 2024, the number of people in the territory could balloon by up to 23 per cent to more than 45,000, according to the hospital corporation.

“Probably more important within that number is the change in the demographics that we have,” said Bilsky. “Our population is actually aging.”

Figures show the proportion of people over 65 could leap from 11 per cent in 2014 to 17 per cent in 2024.