Emergency rooms across Canada are facing a growing crisis — staffing shortages, burnout, worsening wait times, closures, a lack of adequate funding and a surge of patients seeking urgent care threatening to overwhelm a system on the brink of collapse.
We train too few doctors and nurses, and the pay in the most needed positions is too low. There are plenty of bandaid solutions around but unless these underlying issues get solved nothing will change.
Yup, not enough med-school slots, not enough doctors to teach more med-school classes, not enough hospitals to employ more staff back when staffing them wasn’t the problem. These issues have been decades in the making and there’s now no easy fix. If provinces had kept pace with medical infrastructure this wouldn’t be an issue today.
Eventually we’re going to end up paying the bill to get caught up, at a premium, with interest, at inflated prices, with money that doesn’t exist because instead of saving anything they gave it all away in tax cuts and subsidies. They’ll blame it all on Chretien probably.