By PAVEL BAILEY

Tribune Staff Reporter

pbailey@tribunemedia.net

THE president of the Consultant Physicians Staff Association (CSPA) said doctors and nurses at Princess Margaret Hospital are “strained and fatigued” by the increase in gun violence. 

“Obviously, it’s been traumatic for everybody,” Dr Charelle Lockhart told The Tribune yesterday. “I’m a paediatrician, so we’ve had children involved in a number of these incidents, and so that has been pretty traumatic for us.”

A 16-year-old girl was taken to the hospital yesterday after she was caught in the crossfire of a shooting incident that left her 35-year-old father dead after he picked her up for church on Wilson Track off Cordeaux Avenue. The girl’s uncle said she was grazed in the shooting, but did not sustain serious injury. 

 “The emergency room has been very busy, and it really puts a strain on all of us as we are trying to take care of the usual things that come into the emergency room, and you basically have to stop and have all hands on deck to take care of people who are critically injured from these incidents,” Dr Lockhart said. 

 Dr Lockhart said a shortage of staff and supplies is taxing doctors and nurses even more than gun violence.

 She said issues retaining nurses are at a “critical point”.

 “They have made attempts to hire nurses, which is obviously going to be very helpful to us,” she said. “In terms of physician staff, not quite sure there has been much relief on that particular front. So we see that the government is trying, but we really are at a critical point when it comes to staffing and supplies, and we do need some more urgent and immediate relief.” 

 To relieve some of the pressure placed on emergency physicians, Dr Lockhart urged the public to seek medical assistance at poly-clinics or outpatient facilities for immediate non-life-threatening illnesses.

 “We are not a clinic,” she said. “We are not designed to see coughs and colds, and splinters in the finger, and fever for a day, those kinds of things. We are an accident and emergency department, and I think that we should be treated as such. And so our poly-clinics and our outpatient clinics really should be used for those minor non-life-threatening illnesses and injuries.”