CBC News combed through all hospital service closures notices issued by P.E.I. over the last three years. It found rural hospitals are the ones most impacted by those closures.
Health P.E.I. CEO Michael Gardam says the province's health-care system needs to move beyond models where it is reliant on one or two staff to operate a service."We're really struggling to just keep the services going every single day and it all relates to staffing," said Gardam.
Brookins said resources are stretched thin within rural facilities like Western Hospital, and nurses are often taken off the emergency room to staff other parts of the hospital, like the inpatient units."So if one is missing, it's 50 per cent of your staff. And if there is only one and that person's missing, you're missing all of your staff."More Islanders are also ending up in emergency rooms because they don't have access to a primary care provider.
"Western is very small with a lower acuity compared compared to KCMH … KCMH is the one that I worry the most about." "That would be deadly … we have to protect those two emergency departments as much as we possibly can. So we will make changes elsewhere in order to protect those." Because some ERs and CECs function more as primary care units than true "emergency" rooms, Gardam said closing them does not necessarily mean lives are at stake."I'll give you a hypothetical example: Somebody is in a large car accident right out in front of the CEC. Whether the CEC is open or not is irrelevant," he said in an interview last September.
Gardam says Health P.E.I. data shows the Western Hospital does not see a lot of traffic and many of the patients have family doctors.
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