A newborn with a fever waited five hours to be seen by an emergency physician near Toronto.
Patients were surrounded by garbage and urine as they waited 18 to 20 hours for care at a hospital in Fredericton.
And in Alberta, Red Deer’s long-beleaguered hospital was forced to hang tarps to create makeshift treatment spaces.
Those headlines come from different hospitals and different provinces. But they all point to the same grim problem: Emergency rooms are overflowing while an array of respiratory illnesses — COVID-19 included — keep circulating. And it’s happening against a backdrop of behind-the-scenes backlogs that turn front-line ERs into dangerous choke points.
The numbers are staggering. More than 10,000 people are in hospital at once across B.C., the most the province has ever seen, while Quebec grapples with the highest level of patients in its emergency rooms in five years.
In Ottawa, the Queensway Carleton Hospital recently said it was operating at 115 per cent occupancy. By midweek, most Montreal emergency rooms were above full capacity, with some operating at roughly 200 per cent.
I think a lot of it boils down to the provinces being allowed to spend transfer payments however they want to, ie: healthcare/education payments from the feds are not restricted to being used for healthcare/education. Too often you see provincial gov’ts handing out tax credits when they should be increasing taxes instead. Even a 1% increase to provincial sales tax would help … but politicians are focused on being re-elected vs caring for the needs of everyone in their province.
Managing healthcare should not be the job of a minister chosen every 4 years. It should be a non-partisan position, chosen maybe by the government but mainly based on competence and track record.
In the US, Powell and Yellen chaired the federal reserve under both Democratic and Republican governments, not because they were elected for this position, but because they have worked at various levels of government and industry.
On the other hand, this scenario cannot happen in Canada since the ministers are all elected, so unless economists and doctors are running and get elected, they would have to choose ministers without the right qualifications. Even if a doctor is elected, they would still need to spend a considerable amount of time to participate in MP duties, or would otherwise be replaced within 4 years; this time could have been spent on actually implementing useful policies.
Fortunately/unfortunately under Canada’s Constitution the provinces hold a great deal of power over how transfer payments are spent. Up until fairly recently it wasn’t a big issue, but the last few years have made it so.
My comment applies to provinces too. In Quebec, the health minister was solely educated in business, and worked exclusively in accounting and finance before joining politics. Based on that, I doubt he ever set foot in a hospital (unless as a patient), yet is expected to be making decisions impacting thousands of physicians across dozens of specialties?
Similarly, if I was a large company’s CEO, I wouldn’t hire a doctor who worked in a hospital their whole life to become the CFO of the company, where they would need to publish quarterly reports, draft financial statements, and submit accounting documents to government agencies. Maybe they can delegate those tasks to actual accountants, but would their decisions make sense long term? If not, why are we okay with the reverse?