ER doctors say this season is the worst they’ve ever seen, and are now calling for real action to fix the crisis plaguing Canada’s healthcare system.
Before someone says it unironically: “Adopt the US system!”
All the benefits of endless wait times, but with the potential to bankrupt any middle-class family where someone gets sick! (I realize 2 things can be bad at the same time)
US ER wait times are already 10+ hours in many places, and if you’re not turfed immediately you can still wait hours after being admitted. I’ve never understood the wait time argument as being to the advantage of the US system.
Most arguments about wait time are conflating two issues: how long from when you check in to when you see the doctor, and how long between when you try to make an appointment and the date of that appointment.
The US system is not terrible for wait times on appointments, and depending on your type of insurance it’s not terrible to see a specialist. But there are some niche practices that are horrible wait times, such as endocrinologists.
The US system “solves” the office wait time issue by dinging doctors for spending more than 7 minutes per patient.
The US system is terrible for wait times based on appointments as well as ER visits in my experience. In cities like Albuquerque, you can wait months to see a specialist. Even in major cities, there can be enormous wait times and many GPs simply aren’t accepting new patients.
I have a very high end insurance plan, and I do not wait. My experience is very different from many of those in the Bay Area, and is very, very different from New Mexico and most of the US southeast.
Lemme guess … government throws up their hands … “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!” …
… I guess we’ll have to privatize
More like we tried reducing funding and we are all out of ideas
More like the feds increased heathcare transfer payments by a HUGE amount in 2023 but the provinces wouldn’t agree to spend ALL of the new money on healthcare … so they can give big business tax breaks instead, then start privatizing more healthcare.
It’s a never ending spiral to the bottom. :(
We’ve tried breaking the system worse and it’s not fixing it!
Jain says Canadians are waiting in emergency departments with serious illnesses for 10 to up to 32 hours. The CMA also reported an approximate 20-hour wait time in some parts of the country.
Where are these hospitals located??
I’m looking at the Lakeridge Health (Durham Region) wait times, and they are 1 hour for Oshawa, Bowmanville, and Port Perry; 3 hours Ajax/Pickering. Very, very reasonable.
The University Health Network of hospitals in Toronto lists under 2 hours at Toronto General and an hour and a half at Toronto Western.
Markham Stouffville reports under 2 hours wait in their ER.
I would have to suspect if they haven’t already reduced hours or closed the facility it’s in small towns. They often can’t find enough staff so they close down and residents then need to make drives to the next major city to get treatment.
Often this involves multiple hour drives on icy and snow covered roads this time of year.
That said in the greater Vancouver area it’s not uncommon to wait 8+ hours in the ER for less severe cases. Often the ERs become overflow for drop in clinics that cannot handle the volumes.
Often the ER is the stopping place for those needing prescription renewals too as GPs (if one has one) can be 3-6 weeks out for bookings and I’m told there’s a mismatch to the renewal length maximums.
Ideally, never get sick, old, or need meds and there’s no issues… /s
8 hours to be seen is possible in greater Vancouver, but definitely not typical. Current wait times are about as bad as they’ve ever been, but avg wait times are still about 1 to 4 hours. I think it’s the rural hospitals that get really bad.
I’m really sorry to hear that the situation in BC is bad.
I’ll consider myself really lucky to have had many ER visits in my life (me, my kids, etc.) and not having to wait more than 5 hours, even when the ER is super full. Broke my arm during the pandemic, and I don’t think it was more than 2 hours in and out, x-rays and all!
Are people going to your ERs for minor things? Colds, flus, etc.? I’ve been in emergency rooms where it’s hard to tell who’s the patient and who’s the family waiting for them. No visible pain or injuries, etc… I can only imagine non-emergencies can really clog the system up, too.
Often the ER is the stopping place for those needing prescription renewals too as GPs (if one has one) can be 3-6 weeks out for bookings and I’m told there’s a mismatch to the renewal length maximums.
That’s wild. Walk-in clinic doctors can often prescribe meds. If it’s a matter of waiting for your GP to renew them, that’s something you take up with your pharmacy, not the ER!
There are so many levels of care before needing the ER, and I wonder if just a ton of people make the ER their first stop, even when they don’t have/need to.
In years past I’ve had shorter wait times due to late night injuries from sports or hockey. I’ve always driven to smaller hospitals on the edges of town.
I’m not sure today how quickly that would go. A couple of years ago I broke a bone in my foot during a road trip in northern BC. They treated me in a small town were I was the only patient that day. I was treated by a GP and Nurse on a 2 week rotation from Saskatoon as there was no BC doctors for this small town. They didn’t have the air cast I needed but told me I could deal with that at my ER when I get home to Vancouver.
A week later when I got home I spent 8 hours one day at the local ER before I left due to a crazy medial situation that was erupting in the ER that I felt uncomfortable with, then the next day when I returned it was another 4+ hours waiting to see a doctor for the cast. Then I was able to get a referral to a specialist from there.
Most people would prefer to go to a drop in clinic before ERs but often the clinics are full for the day by the first hour they are open. There’s limits on how many patients they can see. If you have a illness many can’t wait the 2-4 weeks it takes to see a family GP so the walk in clinics (which are becoming more by appointment only) become that next stop before the catch all of the ER. I can’t imagine the BS those sick that need a note for work from a Doctor do.
I had a minor surgery in the summer. There was minor complications afterwards. It was 2 weeks before I could even do a phone consult with the family GP and then the walk in clinics were full. I was lucky to have one of the local clinics have me to wait around at the end of the day to see if they could squeeze me in to tend to my bandage issues. If they didn’t I was looking at a 2-3 day game of trying to find a clinic each morning.
In Vancouver I know someone that went to a thing called “Urgent Care” on a Sunday to get meds for her senior mother that had covid. The urgent care was there to take the load off the ER. After waiting 3 hours in there to see a healthcare person they were told they don’t issue prescriptions there and they would need to go to the ER for the prescription which was another long wait. It’s a good thing she wasn’t too sick /s.
There are issues with the timing of prescriptions, how far out they can be issued, and combined with the time frames it can take to see your GP many end up at the ER as a stop gap measure especially seniors if they lose track of their prescriptions.
There are also huge issues with nurses/care aids doing home care. Often there aren’t enough and seniors that rely on them for in home care need to wait for a day or two extra for those visits when there is enough staff. I saw this with my senior family members first hand just before Covid.
I fear it’s going to get worse before it gets better from here.
What a nightmare! I wonder what Ontario is doing that BC isn’t, because that doesn’t sound like healthcare to me!
Pretty much everywhere except the largest metro areas. I’ve sat in Kelowna for 10 hours to get checked for appendicitis and had to come back the next day because they didn’t have techs by the time they saw me.
Pretty much everywhere except the largest metro areas
Kelowna isn’t what I’d consider a small place! Over 200,000 people makes it around the same population as Oshawa (just under 200,000), and wait times right now are 1h 4min.
Historically, smaller hospitals have shorter wait times.
I’m not doubting you at all, since it’s been reported quite a few times that ER wait times around the country have been extremely long. I’m simply not seeing where these hospitals are.
If it’s only a handful in very specific areas, then I don’t see why this can’t be fixed easily. Even in Ontario, where the Ford Government withheld millions in healthcare funding, we don’t seem that bad for wait times, but I’m always for providing more support for frontline workers.
Try Nanaimo. A city of over 100,000 people… there is ONE walk-in clinic in the city, and they are rarely open. You go there and it’s either closed or there is a sign on the door “Accepting 10 patients today”. So you go to the Nanaimo General ER and IF you’re lucky, you will be seen in about 8 to 10 hours.
Brutal! So, from all the comments, it seems like BC is in terrible shape.
It’s not any better in Alberta. :-(
In BC you can “play games” with the medical and go to smaller communities and find a Emergency Care Clinic that serves a smaller community.
Family doctors are impossible to get. There are more than a million people on the waiting lists.
To be fair, the government is making some progress on improving things. They’ve made changes to allow more doctors to be certified. They’ve pumped money into training programs (they pay a full salary and all tuition at university for some certifications). It’s not perfect but it is something.
Edit: fixed some words that got mangled on mobile
The worst cases are mostly small, often serving low-density rural areas—in Ontario, Chesley, Clinton, and Wingham are a few names I could find quickly that have had such severe staff shortages they’ve had to reduce ER hours or close temporarily (they’re fairly close together, in Bruce and Huron counties, so if one of them closes the patients that would have gone to that one probably go to the others instead and make the wait times there worse). The hospitals with long wait times merely have, say, two doctors handling the ER patients where they should have three.
One part of the problem is that the doctors and nurses we do still have tend to migrate toward the larger metro areas, just like people in other lines of work. That leaves hospitals in small- to medium-sized urban areas even more understaffed, sometimes to the point that not even one doctor or RN can take a vacation without causing truly excessive wait times even if a shutdown can be avoided. In Ontario, western areas seem most affected, but the northern part of the province has been dealing with chronic medical understaffing for decades already, not just since COVID.
Nova Scotia here. Our local ER is open occasionally. Generally it is closed due to labor shortages. Can’t set wait times when it’s completely closed. Sometimes it’s a shift sometimes it’s entire weeks of closure. This summer it was closed for two months. So ER wait times…what ER?
So, what do you do if, you have an amputation or there’s a car accident? Jesus, I can’t even believe things are this bad :(
You hope there is an ambulance nearby that can help but likely hood of that is slim as well, as they are understaffed by hundreds of paramedics, or…you die. Our regional hospital ER wait time right now is between 5 and 7 1/2 hours on Tuesday, at lunch time. That’s an hour away. Weekends you just don’t go. Family docs are non-existent so many have to ER just for a scrip.
Fast track the recognition of the credentials of foreign trained healthcare professionals. Do it yesterday!
