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.
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?