Canada's hospital emergency rooms have hit a breaking point. Is it the new normal?https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-hospitals-wait-times-9.7123684Six days in an overflow stretcher. Beds in storage rooms. Patients dying in their seats.
No, we're not describing an episode of HBO's gritty medical drama The Pitt. These are real-life scenes playing out in Canada's emergency rooms.
From Carbonear, N.L., where a man recently died of a heart attack during a 10-hour wait to see a doctor, to Calgary, where a woman pleaded "please don't let me die" during the hours she bled onto a stretcher in the ER, hospitals are bursting at the seams as backlogs and access issues affect patient flow.
"I think we're close to the breaking point," Dr. Margot Burnell, the president of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), told CBC News.
The issue for emergency departments is that they can't control who comes through their doors, said Burnell, a medical oncologist in Saint John, N.B. ERs are not only seeing increased numbers, but the patients that come through are also more medically complex.
This means longer wait-times both to see a doctor and to get a bed when a patient is admitted, Burnell explained. "Patient care, unfortunately, is being affected."
IMO contributing factors to the "medical complexity" of cases coming into ERs is the delay times for diagnostics and treatments,
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wait-times-for-health-care-in-canada-2025 , and Canada's under-investment in higher-end diagnostic equipment, such as MRI and CT scanners, ,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/282401/density-of-magnetic-resonance-imaging-units-by-country/ ,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266539/distribution-of-equipment-for-computer-tomography/ ,
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/availability-of-positron-emission-tomography-pet-imaging . Delayed diagnoses and delayed treatments - ~6 1/2 months of delay! - mean conditions get more complicated and sometime cause death. And if a doctor can't see a critically ill patient immediately (or the patient is too critical) they go to the ER.
Carbonear, NL is a somewhat remote small town; Calgary, AB is a major city. Geography is a challenge for healthcare in much of Canada, but large cities are seeing this as well. It's a systemic problem, not a geography problem.
I came across the OP article on FB, and, predictably, it's caused significant kerfuffle, with the predictable US bashers making noise. I and my family have had more experience with US healthcare than I'd like - good experiences - so I've been having "fun" pointing real life as well as the statistical realities noted above.
