Porter: Aging hospital cries out for teardown

Shirley Sherwin’s hospital bed is less than a metre from the washroom. So why does it take either two nurses or her daughter’s gymnastic talents to get her there?

“First, I get the walker. I help her get to the door,” her daughter, Nancy, explains beside her mother’s bed. “The walker won’t fit through so I have to collapse it a bit. Then she holds the wall and I pull the walker out over her. . . ”

Sherwin’s room is at the end of Toronto East General Hospital’s B wing. It was built 52 years ago. Patients back then must not have had to walk themselves to the bathroom. Or at least, not sick, elderly patients who might need a little help getting around.

That was also before MRSA and VRE were anything more than a random string of letters. The B wing is home to oncology and renal patients, precisely those most susceptible to these kinds of superbugs. The rooms have no sinks by the door for nurses and doctors to wash their hands. And each has at least two beds. So when a patient is diagnosed with a superbug, at least one bed has to come out into the hall.

When I stopped in this week, five patients on Sherwin’s floor had superbugs. You could spot them by the line of tape across the door. Back in 1959, they didn’t build hospital rooms with isolation in mind.

They also didn’t build very big sewage pipes.

Case in point: Sherwin just moved onto the B wing last week, after a month spent a few floors higher up. The wing was closed off for four months after a pipe backed up, spewing raw sewage out of the sink in the utility room. By the time plumbers shut down the pipe, “dirty dish water” was dripping through the ceiling one floor below.

This wouldn’t be a big deal if it was a one-off or even a two-off. My basement flooded during a rainstorm last summer. But at Toronto East General Hospital, there are four to five floods every single week, staff say.

Code blue rushes doctors and nurses toward a heart attack in most hospitals. Code 69 ushers the plumbers toward disaster at Toronto East General.

Do you need any more convincing that the hospital needs to be torn down and rebuilt?

The hospital was opened a few months before the Great Depression. Since then, bits have been added here and jammed there like sticky pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Walking down the halls can feel like stepping through time: One minute you are in a gleaming pediatric emergency department with skylights, the next you are in a dark, 60-year-old urology clinic that resembles a mad scientist’s laboratory.

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Porter: Aging hospital cries out for teardown

By Catherine Porter Columnist Shirley Sherwin's hospital bed is less than a metre from the washroom. So why does it take either two nurses or her daughter's gymnastic talents to get her there? “First, I get the walker. I help her get to the door,” her



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