'The lifeboat is full': Canada's health-care system is failing. There is no easy solution
The appendix is just a small, skinny hollow tube. But when it’s blocked by a stone or infection, it gets sore and swollen, and as the pressure inside builds up, so does the pain.
Emergency doctor Alecs Chochinov has seen multiple patients with appendicitis who had spent four, six, eight hours in the emergency waiting room, curled up on the floor in agony, sometimes vomiting.
Current wait times at his Winnipeg hospital, like many across Canada, big and small, are miserable, Chochinov reports, and while the word “crisis” is being tossed around to describe the state of the country’s health-care systems, it’s not so much a sky-is-falling scenario as a slow “swirling around the drain,” he said. Things were teetering before the pandemic. COVID just sped the deterioration up. “Our system is not viable in the longer-term at this rate of decline,” said Chochinov, who headed the University of Manitoba’s department of emergency medicine until 2020.
“We’ve got doctors going out into waiting rooms and doing waiting room medicine, trying to pick out the really sick patients,” Parks said. “We know there are patients that are slipping through the cracks because of this environment.”
Rates of “left without being seen” are increasing. At Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre, the rate has been up to one in four. “Imagine the faces of the people who leave,” said Chochinov. “They’re often the people who are the most vulnerable. They don’t have someone to say, ‘You need to stay, I’ll look after the kids.’”
The appendix is just a small, skinny hollow tube. But when it’s blocked by a stone or infection, it gets sore and swollen, and as the pressure inside builds up, so does the pain.
Emergency doctor Alecs Chochinov has seen multiple patients with appendicitis who had spent four, six, eight hours in the emergency waiting room, curled up on the floor in agony, sometimes vomiting.
Current wait times at his Winnipeg hospital, like many across Canada, big and small, are miserable, Chochinov reports, and while the word “crisis” is being tossed around to describe the state of the country’s health-care systems, it’s not so much a sky-is-falling scenario as a slow “swirling around the drain,” he said. Things were teetering before the pandemic. COVID just sped the deterioration up. “Our system is not viable in the longer-term at this rate of decline,” said Chochinov, who headed the University of Manitoba’s department of emergency medicine until 2020.
“We’ve got doctors going out into waiting rooms and doing waiting room medicine, trying to pick out the really sick patients,” Parks said. “We know there are patients that are slipping through the cracks because of this environment.”
Rates of “left without being seen” are increasing. At Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre, the rate has been up to one in four. “Imagine the faces of the people who leave,” said Chochinov. “They’re often the people who are the most vulnerable. They don’t have someone to say, ‘You need to stay, I’ll look after the kids.’”
MSN
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