The emergency room at the Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital in Perth will remain closed until Thursday because of a staffing shortage.
The emergency room at the Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital in Perth closed Saturday morning and it will remain closed until Thursday because of a staffing shortage."I'm sad, and I'm fearful. I'm fearful of what this means to people who will be deprived of emergency medical care for the next four, five days," said Dr. Alan Drummond, an emergency room physician at the Perth Hospital.
“The rest of our hospital services remain intact. We are running full services in every other department and we also have two sites. Our emergency department in Smiths Falls is in full operation,” he said."To be strict about the language; yeah, COVID caused the closure of our emergency department but the reality of it is we have no built-in resilience in our nursing staff," Drummond said on Saturday.
Word of the closure this weekend comes after a note earlier in the week that the hospital was looking at the possibility of having to close the Perth hospital ER overnight through the summer, which the hospital later said would not happen. Cohen explained that the nightly closures were a contingency plan.
Dr. Drummond told CFRA earlier this week that the number of staff has been dwindling because of people leaving for other opportunities or quitting because of the working conditions.