Private donors asked to fix 'dire' wheelchair shortage at Abbotsford hospital

Wheelchairs are in such short supply at Abbotsford Regional Hospital that patients aren’t getting all the support they need to avoid deteriorating in their beds.

That, at least, is how a hospital occupational therapist described the situation in a spring fundraising campaign for donations to buy new chairs.

In an interview with The Current, the hospital’s executive director suggested that while new wheelchairs would be beneficial, the problem isn’t quite so bad as it described in the fundraising push. But ARH does have far fewer wheelchairs than neighbouring facilities. And statistics show that, in recent years, ARH has seen a steady increase in the prevalence of hospital-acquired complications, like pneumonia, that can be alleviated by getting patients out of their beds.

‘Simply not meeting our patient and staff needs’

In March, the Fraser Valley Health Care Foundation distributed a press release declaring the hospital to be “in dire need of wheelchairs for patients with reduced mobility.”

The foundation is one of nine around the region that function as Fraser Health’s fundraising arm, soliciting donations from the community to pay for equipment and infrastructure at local hospitals. That money supplements funding from the health authority and provincial government, which provide the vast bulk of Fraser Health’s $5.5 billion annual budget.

In the foundation’s press release, Nicole Koehn, an occupational therapist and clinical lead at ARH, said the shortage of wheelchairs was having significant impacts on patient.

Koehn said the hospital currently has only 40 wheelchairs to service the hospital’s 400 acute care beds. She said that when the hospital opened in 2008, it had fewer beds and treated fewer patients, but had twice as many wheelchairs.

Koehn said the lack of wheelchairs was limiting the ability of staff to get patients out of their beds in ways that prevent further illnesses and injuries.

“Forty wheelchairs are simply not meeting our patient and staff needs,” Koehn said in the release. “Not having adequate wheelchairs available on the units limits staff ability to get their patients out of bed to support early mobilization and prevent deconditioning, and other hospital acquired impairments.”

She continued: “Quality of care is significantly impacted when a patient’s ability to leave their room to enjoy amenities such as green spaces and live music (in the atrium) is negated. We need your help to get wheelchairs back on the units at ARH. Let’s give patients the equipment they need to focus on their wellness goals while they recover in hospital.”

The foundation and Fraser Health work together on fundraising efforts but their descriptions of the wheelchair supply don’t align. That’s likely because health executives tend to be less willing—and have less incentive—than fundraisers to describe the negative repercussions of a lack of vital equipment.

In a phone interview with The Current, Abbotsford Regional Hospital executive director Brendan Abbott said he wouldn’t agree with Koehn’s dire description of the wheelchair situation at his facility.

Abbott said the number of wheelchairs at the hospital is always fluctuating. (In an email earlier this month, a Fraser Health spokesperson wrote that the hospital had approximately 60 basic wheelchairs and additional specialized wheelchairs.)

When asked if there are enough wheelchairs at ARH, Abbott said: “I don’t know there is a ‘right number of wheelchairs’... because there is never an exact mapping of beds to wheelchairs. I think what we would like to see is there are probably [currently] some wheelchairs moving between units and we’d like to seek more available on each unit and that would just simplify things for us a little bit more.”

Abbott said staff use a variety of wheelchairs and mobility devices to get patients out of bed and active.

“Having more wheelchairs in close proximity to our units certainty makes some of those efforts for our care teams easier, and that is really what we’re able to accomplish in this [fundraising] exercise.

A Fraser Health spokesperson wrote in an email that private donations through its foundations “helps us ensure our staff and medical staff have sufficient equipment at our sites to meet the unique needs of our patients and communities.”

According to the Fraser Valley Health Care Foundation, purchasing 40 wheelchairs would cost around $200,000. If ARH’s need for wheelchairs is “dire,” as the foundation put it, FVC asked Abbott why Fraser Health doesn’t use money from its $5 billion budget to buy more wheels for its patients, rather than waiting on donations.

Abbott didn’t directly answer that question when put to him.

But he said Fraser Health “does purchase its own equipment. But we also have really strong partnerships with our foundation, and in this case we really wanted to partner with our foundation and it was time to do a good buy of wheelchairs for our inpatient areas.”

Abbott said the hospital and foundation had recently bought a complement of stackable wheelchairs that can be used to wheel patients to and from their vehicles.

“This seemed like the next category and we're really happy to partner with the foundation and for some of the spotlights can bring to the community around different needs, and always pleased to see some of the results that they can get from campaigns,” he said.

The numbers don’t lie however. Abbotsford Regional Hospital has both significantly fewer wheelchairs per patient and increasing rates of ailments that can be alleviated or prevented by getting patients out of bed.

Whether one uses Koehn’s tally of 40 wheelchairs or Fraser Health’s accounting of 60 chairs, the figure suggests they’re in short supply.

Fraser Health said there are 65 wheelchairs at Chilliwack General Hospital, a considerably smaller facility, and 30 wheelchairs at Fraser Canyon Hospital, which is just a fraction of the size of Abbotsford Regional Hospital. Mission Memorial Hospital has 20 wheelchairs.

Langley Memorial Hospital, meanwhile, has 300 wheelchairs. It shares those chairs with a 200-bed long-term care facility. But even if one were to generously assume that each patient at that long-term care facility has their own personal wheelchair, LMH would still have far more chairs per patient than Abbotsford’s hospital.

Hospital-acquired ailments like pneumonia and urinary tract infections have been on the rise for years in Fraser Health’s hospitals, according to the health authority’s report cards. The rate of hospital-acquired pneumonia increased by nearly 50% across Fraser Health hospitals since 2019, and urinary tract infections have increased by around 40%.

Those aren’t directly attributable to the supply of mobility devices, but wheelchairs are critical to strategies to prevent such ailments.

Although Abbotsford Regional Hospital’s pneumonia and infection rates are below the Fraser Health average, both figures are significantly above targets set by the health authority.

Those report cards state that “mobilization is seen as integral to pneumonia prevention” and that the health authority’s “regional early mobilization strategy” will contribute to reducing urinary tract infections. A Fraser Health spokesperson said that strategy is focused on “early and routine strengthening and mobilization of patients.”

Getting patients more active early in their hospital stays “leads to improved muscle strength, accelerated recovery from illness and a notable reduction in hospital-acquired conditions such as pressure ulcers, falls and the inability to think clearly,” a Fraser Health spokesperson wrote. As Abbott said, staff use wheelchairs as part of that critical mobilization work.

Now, the Fraser Valley’s biggest hospital seems finally set to receive a much-needed influx of chairs bought with fundraised money. They’ll bolster a fleet that has dwindled over 15 years and now pales compared to other local hospitals. And they might be even more important than that.