Family of the Brampton woman who was placed in a hallway at Brampton Civic Hospital (BCH) for five days waiting for a bed to become available has started a petition calling on Queen’s Park to add in-patient beds at Peel Memorial Centre for Integrated Health and Wellness (Peel Memorial).

The petition demands 200 in-patient beds be added either at BCH or Peel Memorial.

“Peel Memorial is not a hospital,” Lori Leckie, mother of “Hallway Patient No. 1” Jamie-Lee Ball told The Guardian. “Premier Kathleen Wynn was wrong to refer to it as such. It is a giant walk-in clinic. It was a band-aid attempt to keep the people of Brampton quiet.”

The Brampton woman said since the news of her daughter’s ordeal at BCH became public, she has been inundated with calls and emails from other patients that shared the inhumane conditions they, too, experienced at BCH.

In an attempt to garner action, the Brampton woman said she reached out to Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey and her local MPP, Harinder Malhi. Neither has returned Leckie’s calls or emails.

Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath weighed in on "the health care crisis" in the province during the question period today (April 24). Reckless cuts to hospital funding by Wynne's Liberal government has left Brampton-area hospitals in crisis and patients like Ball are paying the price for the short-sighted policies, she said.

“Why does this Liberal government think that hallway medicine is good enough for Jamie-Lee and other patients in Brampton?” Horwath said. “When will this Liberal government stop the cuts to hospitals, admit that they’ve created a gridlock crisis, and do something about it?”

In a previous conversation with The Guardian, Dr. Naveed Mohammad, vice-president of medical affairs at William Osler Health System (Osler), which runs the BCH, Peel Memorial and Etobicoke General Hospital, said the congestion in the emergency room at BCH was due to a situation called Code Gridlock, which occurs when a hospital experiences a surge of patients, but doesn’t have resources to cope with the volume.

“The (emergency) department at BCH was built to see 250 patients in a 24-hour period, but we’re now seeing, on certain days, more than 400,” Mohammad previously told The Guardian. “Last month (March), we averaged 357 patients a day. Our feeling and hope was that opening the Urgent Care Centre (UCC) at Peel Memorial would take away some of the volume … and that happened for about 10 days, but now our volumes at BCH are back up to their usual very high levels.”