Staff at Charlottetown’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital are continuing to have trouble keeping up with the flow of patients in the emergency department.
Health PEI issued a news release Tuesday afternoon warning of higher than usual wait times, and the number of patients in the department only grew overnight.
Just before 7:30 a.m. the hospital was reporting wait times longer than 10 hours for all 17 patients in the waiting room. There were 10 patients being treated by a doctor, and a total of 56 in the emergency department.
That means at least 29 people are currently admitted to the emergency department, a number which Mike MacDonald, Health PEI’s acting director of nursing, said should ideally be zero. But there is nowhere else for them, because all the other beds in the hospital are full.
