Cape Breton Regional Hospital begins new year with overcrowding

Cape Breton continues with slew of ER closures The first weekend of 2020 saw many emergency room closures in Cape Breton. However, hope might be on the way. CTV’s Ryan MacDonald reports.

HALIFAX — It's been a busy start to the new year at one of Nova Scotia’s busiest emergency rooms, located at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital. With emergency rooms around the region closing during the weekend, it means even more traffic at the crowded hospital.

"When you add on the pressures of the emergency room closures, it does make that more challenging for us,” says Dr. Chris Milburn, the Nova Scotia Health Authority's chief of emergency medicine for the eastern zone. "And then we have the ongoing issue of the inpatient bed space problems, which are impacting us, so we have sort of at least a triple-whammy at this point."

Meanwhile, Nova Scotia's opposition Progressive Conservatives are expressing their concerns about ER closures during the holiday break. In a news release, they note emergency rooms in Glace Bay, Northside General, and Victoria County Memorial would be closed a combined 700+ hours.

"This is nothing new, unfortunately, to the residents of Northside-Westmount or Cape Breton as a whole, or the province for that matter,” says Progressive Conservative MLA Murray Ryan. “It's constant, it's chronic – and it is a crisis."

The PCs also point to the annual Accountability Report on emergency departments, which they say shows Cape Breton ER closures increased by over 58 per cent in 2019.

"They don't feel like they're being listened to; they're getting frustrated,” says Ryan. “And at the end of the day, all of the residents of the community are suffering."

However, Milburn says, while he wouldn't call himself a promoter of the McNeil government, he believes the province is doing the best it can under challenging circumstances. He also notes the region’s health-care crisis was developing years before the Liberals took power.

"Screaming at this government and wanting to boot them out, and thinking that will automatically make things better, is wrong,” says Milburn. “We gotta step back and say, 'Yeah, we've made some mistakes, we haven't planned well – how did we get here?'

The Nova Scotia Health Authority says the closures are due to lack of physician coverage, with the exception of New Waterford, where installation of a new sprinkler system will keep its emergency room closed until March.

Meanwhile, Milburn says work is being done to cut down on the number of inpatients at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital in advance of flu season. He also adds that many doctors, who had withdrawn inpatient services due to a pay-equity dispute, have gone back to providing them under the Hospitalist Service Contract.