Halifax hospitals spend big to evict unwanted visitors

I was asked to give a review of the health care system. Imagine you're in the hospital and a mouse starts crawling around your bed. That's what Jordan Bonaparte witnessed at the Halifax Infirmary, and he's shocked more people aren't talking about it. After spending hours watching mice brazenly run around, a paramedic told him something unexpected. One of them said, there are as many mice as there are patients in here, if not more. When a mouse started crawling up the patient's bed, Bonaparte had enough and posted this video. If your bar for health care is set so low that you're accepting there to be mice running around the emergency room where people are clinging to life, I think that's a... An unreasonably low expectation. Nova Scotia Health agrees. It knows pests are a huge problem at two sites in particular. Dartmouth General Hospital and the QE2 complex are both grappling with huge infestations, likely stirred up by all the construction nearby. We did expect an increase. I don't think we expected quite the increase that we're seeing. Some staff told me that the issue is largely normalized in the hospital because the mice are everywhere. Some staff have named the mice in their department, while one doctor told me she had to work from home for several days because a mouse died in the walls of her office and the smell became unbearable. It's a serious issue that we take seriously. It's very unsettling to To come to a place for health care and. ...and have to deal with these sightings. CBC has obtained these documents that break down how much Nova Scotia Health has spent on pests over the last five years. Dartmouth General used to spend about $10,000 a year. Last year's tab was $120,000. The QE2 went from about $36,000 to $323,000 a year just on pests. That's an increase of nearly 800%. You know the volume of those sightings has increased exponentially over the last couple of years and as a result our efforts to control and combat the issue have gone up. Despite being right next door, the IWK says its problem is pigeons. It spent $180,000 last year grappling with unusual bird behavior. The hospital installed nets and spikes to prevent them from coming back. At the QE2 there are now exterminators on site every day and staff patrol the outside of the buildings looking for nooks and crannies that need to be filled up. Unfortunately, it's a drawn-out process that we have to continuously monitor and take corrective action for. Nova Scotia Health says this issue has been years in the making and will likely take years to fix. Carolyn Ray, CBC News, Halifax.