Internal government data shows nearly 2,000 patients on average kept in ‘unconventional spaces’ like hallways and break rooms in January — the highest number ever recorded
Bonnie Luciano got to the Southlake Regional Health Centre around 4 p.m. on Oct. 5, 2023. She’d just gone through her second round of chemotherapy and was feeling severe side effects.
The 46-year-old Markham woman was in serious pain and soon realized a long wait was ahead.
“I cried softly in my husband's arms and held my head in pain while I waited and waited and waited,” she wrote last October in a letter to the editor of Newmarket Today.
She almost left the hospital, despite her pain, but finally heard her name called.
“I felt a sense of relief thinking I’d be taken to a waiting bed,” she wrote.
Her relief quickly turned to dismay. Luciano was given a bed in an “internal waiting room,” as she described it, that used to house mental health patients awaiting evaluation.
Neither her pain nor her wait stopped once she was admitted.
At 5:30 a.m. the next morning, Luciano had enough. She signed discharge papers because “for the sake of my health … (I) knew I needed to go home and get proper rest.”
Altogether, she spent over 12 hours in the hospital, much of it in what the provincial health-care system calls an “unconventional space.”
“Unconventional spaces” is a bureaucratic euphemism for what many Ontarians know as hallway health care.
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