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Dr. Alan Forster, vice-president of quality, performance and population health, acknowledged that The Ottawa Hospital has had to get creative in finding spaces for all the patients admitted in recent days. He said the hospital has consistently been over 100 per cent capacity for a few months, reaching up to 120 per cent at times.

“There may be some lack of normalcy, but the staff are there to make sure the patients are looked after.”

A combination of increased traffic due to a bad flu and viral season and the demands of an aging population on hospital beds have created a perfect storm that has stretched resources at hospitals in the city to their limits in recent weeks. Hospitals across the province are facing similar problems, said Forster.

Leah Levesque, vice-president of patient care and chief nursing executive at Queensway Carleton Hospital, said the extended overcapacity situation there is worrisome.

“Code Orange (which denotes an external disaster such as the OC Transpo-train crash) is top of mind,” she said. “I think we are all worried about that one adverse event in our emergency departments. It is not going to be a good outcome for anybody. We all are fully aware of the high risk at this point.”

She added: “I would say it is a crisis when you are cancelling surgery and you’ve got 22 patients who are on stretchers, which limits your ability to provide them with high quality care … plus you can’t see the emergency patients because you don’t have any stretchers to see them on.”