The Interior Health Authority is defending its handling of overcrowding at Vernon Jubilee Hospital.
Vernon city council was told Tuesday that a number of measures have been taken to ensure patients’ needs are a priority, including an additional 23 beds being added in the last two years.
“We are not sitting still,” said Pat Furey, VJH administrator.
“We are addressing the capacity issues.”
VJH is funded for 148 acute care beds but daily occupancy generally runs above 100 per cent.
Physicians and nurses have launched a campaign demanding the provincial government develop two shelled-in floors in the new patient care tower so more acute care beds can be opened.
Twenty to 30 people a day in acute care beds require residential care but they remain in the hospital until space can be found for them. Furey isn’t sure if opening the two floors will improve the situation.
“Acute beds cost $1,000 a day (to operate) while residential are $125. If you are keeping residential patients in acute, that’s an expensive place to keep them,” she said.
It could cost about $10 million to develop each of the shelled-in floors for use by patients, and then $10 million each annually to operate the floors.
IHA is currently soliciting bids to develop 46 new residential care beds in the North Okanagan and Furey says the goal is to discharge patients to the appropriate residential care or home care setting.
“If we had 20 to 30 beds freed up, we’d have no problem handling acute care flow.”
Furey also discussed indicators related to quality of care, and she insists they have remained the same or improved at VJH.
“Despite the capacity challenges, we are providing quality care comparable with similar-sized facilities in Canada,” she said.
The $180 million patient care tower opens in September.
“The emergency department will be four times the size of the current one. There will be larger operating rooms,” said Furey.
“The intensive care unit will be four times the size of the current one and we’re going from two to four ambulance bays.”
The tower will lead to about 55,000-square-feet of space being vacated in the existing hospital building.
“That will help us deal with some of our capacity issues,” said Furey.
