By Suman Bhattacharyya
Randy Romain has been a chronic care patient at the St. Vincent Hospital for the past five years and remembers a time when he could expect personalized, quality care.
“Nurses had time to sit and talk to you,” he says.
These days, it’s a different story.
“We (the patients) have to wait longer for the care we need, and the care we get is done very fast,” says Romain, 40, who is president of the residents’ council at St. Vincent. “It’s not a good environment.”
Romain, who is quadriplegic and blind, is in the same position as many others at the Cambridge Street hospital.
With provincial government cutbacks to funding for hospitals, patients and staff at St. Vincent are struggling to make do with fewer resources and money.
“What’s suffering is the attention people used to get and the kind of level of quality is not as high as it used to be,” says Michel Bilodeau, president of the Sisters of Charity, which runs St. Vincent and the Elisabeth Bruyere hospital on Bruyere Street.
The Sisters of Charity operate the largest long-term care complex in the region, with a budget of $85 million, 911 beds and 2,000 employees. But recent cuts are threatening its survival.
Bilodeau says over the past five years, the number of chronic care beds in the Ottawa area has dwindled from 890 to 455.
The situation was further complicated after the Ontario government’s Health Services Restructuring Commission ordered 114 hospital beds cut from the Sisters of Charity hospitals by 2003. In addition, St. Vincent, once a rehabilitation and chronic care facility, will now be devoted exclusively to chronic care. This creates added pressures for hospital staff.
Pat Elliott-Miller, chief nursing officer of the Sisters of Charity, says because of smaller bed numbers, patients now in chronic care are those with the most severe problems. As a result, staff can no longer accommodate individual needs.
“They’re having to adjust to patients with very complex needs, with no new staff to help,” she says.
Funding cuts two years ago forced the hospitals to use more non-registered nurses.
While their level of care satisfies the basic needs, Elliott-Miller says sicker patients require added attention.
“When our patients are so much sicker, you need people at the level to deal with that and that means more registered nurses,” she says.
A January report by a nursing task force for the Ontario government recommended that $275 million be injected into the nursing system.
Bilodeau agrees more nurses are needed to accommodate the demand for services. The province said it would grant the Sisters of Charity $4 million for new nurses, but it has yet to receive a penny, he says.
The lack of resources directly affects the quality of care as nurses become more stressed, says Elliott-Miller.
“I would still say that our patients receive quality care, but it’s not the kind of care they would feel totally satisfied with,” she says.
Romain says the patients are feeling the consequences of a stressed-out staff.
“They (the staff) don’t have time to be nice,” he says. “It’s not their fault, it’s just that there’s not enough time.”
Both Bilodeau and Elliott-Miller say they are anxiously awaiting how health-care money from the recent federal budget will be spent. Romain shares this sentiment, saying his concern is for the future.
“If it gets any worse, I don’t see what this country’s coming to,” he says. “This is Canada and people shouldn’t have to suffer.”