Another emergency room doctor is decrying the severe shortage of pediatricians at Kelowna General Hospital (KGH).
“I do think this will have impacts on our pediatric patients and I hope no tragic outcomes occur,” said Dr. Hannah Duyvewaardt.
The shortage has been causing occasional service disruptions for months but now it has caused the entire pediatric ward to shut down for at least six weeks.
The situation prompted Duyvewaardt to take to social media on Thursday to express her concerns.
“I think our community should be concerned about the current pediatric crisis that we are having,” she said in the post.
In the nearly three-minute-long post, Duyvewaardt provided a glimpse into the dire situation.
“I just got off my shift in the emergency department,” she said. “We have a sick kid in our trauma bay from an asthma exacerbation. That pediatrician is helping getting their airway ready, maybe for potential intubation, and then they get called to a stat C-section, and then their pager goes off again, and there’s a seizing baby in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit).
“Which child are they going to leave? Which child will not get their care and attention?”
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Duyvewaardt said there are nearly 20 licensed pediatricians practicing in Kelowna.
Last week, Interior Health (IH) confirmed, however, only six of them are working in the hospital.
“Many of them who stopped working in the hospital couple of years ago,” she told Global News. “I think we need to ask why.”
Duyvewaardt pointed the blame at what she called an overwhelming workload which, according to her, includes one pediatrician tasked with coverage in several departments including the NICU, pediatric psychiatrics, emergency room and other critical services such as high-risk deliveries.
“That’s five different places that our pediatricians are required to be at once, and there’s only one on at a time, and so for years they have advocated, saying this is a unsafe work environment for patients. We need one doctor on for our neonatal unit and one for deliveries and the other one for the emergency department and pediatric care and their voices have been silenced,” Duyvewaardt said in the social media post.
“And so we’re having a doctor’s shortage because they’re worried about putting their own moral and professional integrity at risk, as well as patients.”
In an email to Global News, IH stated that it acknowledges the concerns raised by the KGH emergency department physicians and remains committed to working together on sustainable solutions.
“We are actively engaged with health care providers at KGH as we work together to meet the patient care needs during the current pediatric inpatient unit service disruption,” said Dr. Sam Azzam, IH executive medical director.
Azzam added that physicians have choices on where to practice medicine and these reasons vary, including their personal interest in medicine, preferred work-life balance, and desired compensation level.
“Community pediatricians play a critical role in maintaining child health and reducing the burden on hospitals by managing care in the community,” Azzam said.
Last week, Dr. Jeff Eppler, another ER physician, expressed his concerns over the pediatrician shortage.
He called the pediatric service disruption of this magnitude unprecedented, one he also said has the potential to create even longer waits in an already busy ER.
“If we are trying to care for pediatric admitted patients, then that’s going to impair our ability to treat it will delay care to other patients that come in, because we’re going to be tying up nursing resources. We’ll be tying up beds, tying up physicians,” Eppler said last Friday.
IH has said the pediatric ward closure will only affect pediatric patients who need to be admitted to hospital.
According to IH, those patients will be assessed on a case-by-cases basis and transferred to other hospitals if necessary.
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