A British Columbia kidney patient who had to be airlifted to a Kelowna hospital for treatment was stuck sleeping in the hospital’s hallway for five days because all the rooms were full.
Shawn Ponte was airlifted from Cranbrook, B.C. to Kelowna General Hospital last week. Five days later, he was still sleeping in a bed in a hallway.
Instead of getting angry, Ponte decided to post videos to Facebook to make his point.
In one video, he records the din of hospital machines just a few feet from his bed. “It’s making me go bonkers,” he says in a video he called “I’m going nuts at Kelowna General Hospital” on Facebook.
I'm going nuts at Kelowna general hospital
Posted by Shawn Ponte on Monday, January 2, 2017
Ponte said he went public with his concerns not just for himself but for others who need care.
“If they were so full, and didn’t have the room to begin with, why didn’t they tell the Cranbrook hospital and they could have sent me to a different hospital that could have taken care of me properly,” Ponte said in an interview with CTV Vancouver.
“It’s probably happened before to other people and they just haven’t had the means to get it out there and I finally stood up for myself and said, ‘Hey, enough is enough.’”
Kelowna General Hospital’s administration is calling the situation “unfortunate” and says Ponte’s five-day hallway stint will be the subject of a review.
“We try to minimize that as much as possible, and it is quite rare to have that length of time however it shows the increased acuity and the demand of hospital care right now,” Andrew Hughes, the hospital’s head of medical services, told CTV News.
After five days, Ponte was moved into a room and said Wednesday that was looking forward to getting his operation over with so that he can go back home.
With a report by CTV Vancouver’s Kent Molgat
