An emergency room physician who works at three Toronto hospitals is raising alarm bells over the capacity of some ERs in the city, calling the volume of patients “insane, out-of-control, explosive, never seen before, [and] record-breaking.”
Dr. Raghu Venugopal has worked in emergency rooms for 19 years and said if you ask any ER doctor right now, they would say the current situation concerning.
The number one issue, Venugopal suggested, is that people don’t have other access treatment.
“Whether it’s your five-year-old that has a fever or your 85-year-old mother that has a fever, there’s no real options for those people to get medical care and to get answers for why they’re ill,” he told CityNews.
“For some of the patients that we’re seeing, it’s not that they’re orphaned with no family doctor. It’s just that they can’t get an appointment for three weeks.”
When describing what it’s like to walk into work on an overnight shift, Venugopal said the one word he would use is “demoralizing.”
“When nurses and doctors arrive in the emergency room and the number of patients is 50 to 100 to be seen. You sort of have a sinking feeling like, ‘How am I going to make an impact on that?’ And really what you have to do is just focus on doing your best at that time,” he said.
Venugopal added there’s rarely time to take a break.
“You just see as many human souls as you can. Prioritizing the three main priorities of what ER care is. We have to be fast, we have to be friendly, and we have to be right,” he said.
The hospitals have the capability to bring more doctors in but Venugopal said it alone cannot meet the need.
According to official published data, the Ontario Ministry of Health reported for the past year the wait to see an ER doctor in Ontario is 1.7 to two hours. But Venugopal said that is the median and doesn’t reflect the bell curve.
On Thursday, data posted by Toronto hospitals around 9 a.m. showed wait times at nearly seven hours for Toronto General Hospital, five hours and 42 minutes at Toronto Western Hospital and three hours and 47 minutes for Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
By 3 p.m., Sunnybrook was at six hours and 55 minutes. Toronto General and Toronto Western were sitting at around three-and-a-half hours.
CityNews contacted the hospitals to ask for on-camera interviews, but no one was made available.
North York General Hospital doesn’t provide real-time wait time but an alert on its website Thursday afternoon saying they are seeing a high volume of patients in the ER and to expect longer-than-normal wait times.
‘I will easily see on my ER shift patients waiting four hours, seven hours, eight hours. In Toronto, we have patients waiting 10 hours, and that’s just to see the doctor,” shared Venugopal.
He added that’s only the beginning as many patients will have scans, tests and then treatment, leading to their time in the hospital exceeding 15 or more hours.
“We just don’t have enough doctors, we don’t have enough support services like radiology, we don’t have enough nurses and we don’t have enough beds and one of the real underlying problems in Toronto and Ontario is our hospitals are full … it’s really problematic that our hospitals are full before respiratory season because we know it’s only going to get worse,” Venugopal said.
He noted the fundamentals of the Canadian and Ontarian health care system are strong with well-trained physicians providing excellent care, but they haven’t scaled up enough to meet the needs of the population.
“We need more hospital capacity and long-term health care capacity that can help make space in the ER to see new patients,” Venugopal said.
“We just need more boots on the ground, we need more doctors, we need more nurses, and for Toronto specifically what I would advocate for is surge funding. so that we can have more staffed doctors and nurses on the ground to care for people.”
Venugopal did give the the current provincial government and Premier Doug Ford credit. He noted the province introduced 3,000 beds and plans to build another 3,000.
“But we’re so far behind the needs that our efforts are not keeping up. So the problems are: we have far more medical complexity, we have very serious social problems, we have an aging population, and we have a bigger population, and we just have not kept up with the needs,” Venugopal said.
The Ontario Hospital Association has advocated for $2.7-billion worth of funding to stabilize the system, he said. Representatives for the organization declined an on-camera interview.
“We have the money. What we need is the political will to allocate that money to hospitals,” Venugopal said.
He added he would never tell someone not to go to the ER and he does not put the blame on patients for the current crisis Toronto is in.
“Doctors don’t define emergencies. Politicians, premiers, and nurses don’t define an emergency. A patient and their family define an emergency. And we rely on the public’s good judgment to define when they need emergency care. And that’s the way the ER should work. We are a safety net for everybody. And so patients should feel empowered to make that decision.”
The best advice he said he can give right now: get your flu and COVID-19 vaccines to reduce the chances of severe illness when respiratory conditions hit the peak in Ontario.
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