After a B.C. hospital used a Tim Hortons as emergency overflow space, some health-care experts say overcrowding is a systemic problem that could be solved with better community care.
On Monday and early Tuesday, the emergency department at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster was overflowing, and beds were set up at the adjacent coffee shop to treat patients.
John Calvert, a professor in the Health Sciences department at Simon Fraser University, says that what happened in New Westminster is part of a larger problem.
"One of the big issues here is that we don't have a really integrated health-care system," he told CTV News.
Calvert says that people need better access to care in their own communities, beyond what's offered in walk-in clinics.
"We have a number of community health centres in B.C., which are arguably quite underfinanced, and that is a model that has proved quite successful in other parts of the country," he said.
Those centres offer many different types of care providers, from nurse practitioners to psychologists, under a single roof.
"It's those big gaps in the system that are in part driving the problems we're seeing in emergency wards, because when people have no other choice, that's where they go -- and understandably so," Calvert said.
The head of emergency medicine at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, Dr. Eric Grafstein, agrees that having outside support helps. But he adds that eliminating patients with minor problems from emergency rooms isn't the whole solution.
"There's a lot of long-term-care patients that are in hospital because there's nowhere else for them to go. There needs to be more action and attention to address that problem, so it's a whole system issue and it just shows up first in the [emergency room]," Grafstein said.
Meanwhile, B.C. Premier-designate Christy Clark says she's aware of the problems at Royal Columbian.
"I'm keeping my eye on it. It's something we absolutely have to be concerned about," she said.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Maria Weisgarber
