By SANNIE BROWN

Tribune Staff Reporter

sdorsett@tribunemedia.net

SCORES of patients are being forced to sleep on gurneys in the hallways at the Princess Margaret Hospital, according to Health Minister Dr Duane Sands who told The Tribune yesterday the hospital is continuing to have significant challenges with overcrowding and a shortage of beds.

Dr Sands said the situation is “embarrassing” and it is sad people have to stay in the hallways for up to “three to four days” because “there is just nowhere to put them”.

Dr Sands said the problem will require deliberate structural change, which will not happen in the short-term.

To make matters worse, Dr Sands said there are about 30 long-term patients who no longer need emergency medical services but have been using much needed beds for years. However, he said because there are no long-term facilities to transfer the persons to, they have to stay in the hospital despite not needing the care — at a cost of more than $7million a year.

“We are still seriously challenged, as much as 25 per cent beds of our beds are out of circulation and when you put that together with the significant challenges of overcrowding in (the) Emergency Room, you have patients remaining on emergency virtual wards for days. This is a problem that will require deliberate structural change, none of which will happen in the immediate or short-term,” Dr Sands said.

“In the meantime, it’s a day-to-day struggle because we have tried to decompress the hospital by augmenting services to community clinics but patients have to be admitted unlike other countries, where you have fly by and when the hospital is full to capacity you are no longer allowed to take patients, but the Rand Memorial (in Grand Bahama) and PMH do not have that luxury, we have to take patients as they come.

“This means that persons are in the hallways for days, sometimes on ambulance trolleys, sometimes operating room gurneys and this interferes with the function of the ambulance services and operating room. When you look at the reality of the hospital and the implications of the decisions made and not made, it has had a very real impact on the public’s perception on how much you care as a country,” the Elizabeth MP said.

“When you take your grammy to the emergency room and she ends up in the hallways for three or four days, people think you do not care but it is not that, it is the final consequence of many different decisions made over time.”

Speaking about long-term patients officials hope to phase out of the hospital into another facility, Dr Sands told The Tribune: “So we have 67 beds out of commission plus these 30 or so beds.

“So we have these 30 plus chronic patients in there because there is no long-term or chronic care facility to put them in and when we look at cost, it’s in excess of $7m a year for these long-term chronic patients. What we now have to do is establish or enter into partnership with a long-term facility to provide the level of care to these patients because they can’t go into a regular nursing home because some of them have psychical and mental challenges but they don’t really require in patient care and are using beds for the wrong reasons.”

Dr Sands said in order to fix the problems, health officials have to complete the renovations at PMH, increase the hospital’s capacity, get patients in and out faster and take non-essential services out of PMH.

Last month, the Accident and Emergency Department at PMH experienced a series of challenges, forcing some patients to be relocated to the South Beach Clinic and others to wait for more than 24 hours in some cases.

At the time, Dr Sands the “perfect storm” was caused by years of “dumb and inappropriate decisions” and he is “honestly not sure” when a solution to the “mess” will be found.