A new hospital for Weyburn would improve patient safety, well-being and their access to care, according to front-line staff at the Weyburn General Hospital.
One of the biggest concerns is due to the crowded emergency room at the Weyburn General Hospital, where the three stretchers are only separated by curtains.
"I think that for Weyburn being a smaller city, you are likely to know the person in the stretcher beside you, so there is a lack of privacy," said Dana Renwich, emergency room registered nurse. "When the nurses or physicians are in the ER, getting the medical history, someone in that same room could potentially know that person and overhear their whole medical history."
There are only two private rooms at the Weyburn General Hospital that could potentially hold patients.
"One is a treatment room, that is usually busy, and the other is used for isolation. Also there is only one monitor bed that we use for trauma cases," said Renwich. "There have been times we have had patients in beds that we can't move out and we had someone with a cardiac arrest come in, and the other patients are a curtain away from the situation."
"For that family of the patient who is involved in the cardiac arrest, it is a very emotional time."
"Weyburn is growing and we have outgrown our space; we need more stretchers, we need more beds," said Renwich.
"When we do have a trauma or a cardiac case, we could have six staff surrounding that bed," said Sylvia Danyluk, nurse manager at the Weyburn General Hospital. To accommodate that many staff around one stretcher, all the other stretchers in the ER have to be moved around.
"There is nothing wrong with our equipment, it is the space that is the issue," said Renwich.
"When I need to get an IV, the IV tray is in a bottom drawer and it is a hazard when you reach down, or someone could leave the tray open."
The isolation room is not idle for its intended use, as there is no negative-pressure room in Weyburn. In fact, there is only one negative-pressure room in the whole Sun Country Health Region, and that is located at St. Joseph Hospital in Estevan.
"If someone comes in with something like TB or even active shingles, they should be in a negative-pressure room," said Renwich. "Since Weyburn doesn't have a negative-pressure room, you are potentially putting other patients at risk when you have to deal with these cases."
A new hospital would definitely provide adequate space for an isolation room. "In 2009, when we were looking at pandemic planning, one of the major concerns from the Ministry of Health was the low amount of negative pressure rooms we have," said Danyluk.
"Another concern is for the elderly because there is no near bathroom to the ER," said Renwich. The closest bathroom is through an adjoining room, used by chemotherapy patients. "There is no way to even get a wheelchair through the door."
There is high need for the chemotherapy room at the Weyburn General Hospital, which means that room is being taxed too. "Some days we have six chemotherapy patients, and when a person is going through chemotherapy they like to have their family with them," said Renwich. "We only have three (comfortable) chairs in the chemotherapy room."
"In the last year, we have enough people that are taking chemotherapy, that we have chemotherapy every week, Monday to Friday," said Danyluk.
There are even times when the chemotherapy room has to be extra space for the ER. "One day I was working and we had six trauma patients come in, and we only have three useable beds," said Renwich.
She said they moved chairs out of the chemotherapy room to make additional space for more stretchers. "They are not visible from the ER, and we have a lot of situations that happen like that."
According to the most recent Sun Country emergency medical services report, made on March 31, EMS staff responded to a total of 4,472 calls in the health region during the past year. Weyburn had an all-time high with an increase of 50 calls and 14,00 kilometres, with a total of 1,270 calls and 147,962 kms travelled during the past year.
With all these calls, it is a concern that when the ambulance arrives to the Weyburn General Hospital with an emergency call, they are pulling into an unsheltered bay, meaning the EMS staff have to deal with the elements, in addition to caring for the patient.
"Our practice for patients who are coming back from a tertiary centre is that when they come to us, they are put into a single room and we do our testing to ensure there are no contagions with them," said Danyluk.
"We don't have anywhere near the amount of single rooms that we can put people into, so there are times we have to shuffle people around."
That is not the only time when the staff at the Weyburn General Hospital have to shuffle patients into different beds. "Not all of our rooms have built-in oxygen or suction, so when we have someone who comes back from Regina who requires that, again we have to do shuffling," said Danyluk. There are portable oxygen tanks but those take a lot of room in already small rooms.
There is also a number of three-bed and four-bed rooms at the Weyburn General Hospital that don't provide any privacy. "It is inconvenient for the family, it is disheartening because they have to work around other people coming in, and out of the room," said Danyluk.
Especially for those situations when a family has to discuss end-of-life care, the lack of privacy can be a big issue. "People are more reluctant to have those kind of honest conversations when there are other people in the room."
There is also high demand for the laboratory services, as any patient knows who has had to be at the General Hospital at 9 a.m.
"We moved the lab to the fourth floor a number of years ago because we were running out of room where it used to be located, right next to the X-ray department," said Danyluk. "It had gotten so busy after physician offices shut down their office labs."
"We have to utilize the lab the best we can, and there are a lot of times we have three patients in the chairs at the same time, touching elbows getting their blood work done."
A locker room for the nurses in the lab was sacrificed, so that they could have an additional room just in case a patient in the lab gets woozy, when another patient is using the electro-cardiogram machine.
Another benefit of a new hospital would be design, as more areas could have better line-of-sight and hearing access to all the patients. "Up on the third floor there are two wings, and when you are sitting at the centre desk you can see and hear down one, but there is almost a sound barrier in the other wing," said Danyluk. "A new building would allow for better light and sounds, better acoustics."
Danyluk agreed that since the community is growing there is definitely good reason for a new hospital. "Weyburn's population was around 8,500 to 9,500 for a number of years; but it recently passed over 11,000 in the last census. That is 2,000 more people in the city, and that is not including all the surrounding areas, who are utilizing our services."
