There appears to have been a large and possibly record-setting number of temporary ER closures or service interruptions across the country in 2023 so far, with CTV News finding hundreds instances where a hospital emergency unit, usually in a rural community, has been shut down for hours or days to Canadians seeking emergency care.
Oh yeah totally there’s a “nursing shortage”. Turns out if you treat people like shit, fight them tooth and nail to give them a pay cut in the middle of a pandemic where they’re already stressed to the max some people will leave the profession. Let’s not forget the 6%+ inflation Who would’ve thought this might happen? But then again it’s all part of the plan isn’t it
Yep. Doug Ford is dismantling our medical system in hopes that we start begging for privatization.
Same story in Manitoba and Alberta.
Don’t forget Saskatchewan.
Elect a clown and get a circus. Sorry man.
Pierre will tell us we’re still over-funded and his rich friends should pay even less taxes than the pittance they’re paying now.
No, wait. Isn’t new happy t-shirt Pierre a people’s people? His ads ignore his staunch anti-people voting pattern over the 20 years he’s been a career politician and nothing else after college.
Live in a fairly rural area of Canada, the hospital closest to me closes at night. No new patients can come in. They are too understaffed. They used to let in serious emergencies but they don’t anymore. So it’s better to call 911 than to drive someone to a hospital yourself.
If I call 911, they send us to one of the hospitals about twice the distance away. It’s not super far thankfully, 40mins instead of 20 but still.
Unfortunately, in an emergency situation an extra 20 minutes can be deadly.
I am painfully aware, we took my dad to the closer hospital and he didn’t make it there.
I really think it’s time for the federal government to take control of healthcare. I know it’s not a perfect solution; whenever Pollievre manages to squirm his way into power he’ll use that to do as much damage as he can, for one thing. But with healthcare as a federal responsibility, it at least puts it much more squarely under the direct scrutiny of the public and national press, and puts the blame one single part of the government. It would give us a path forward to actually seeing some kind of improvements in the system. Right now it’s far too easy for the people doing the most damage to act like the problem is someone else’s fault.
Honestly I think this about most things. Federalism is a good idea in principle but I think the Canadian media landscape is just not mentally capable of handling it.
Fed control of healthcare is a baaaaad thing.
See, the cons will get power one day. On that day, the arms length separating healthcare from their meddling destruction will preserve it and keep us safe.
If there was voting reform then the Conservatives would never have a majority again and we wouldn’t have to worry about it. Even still, it’d be a lot more difficult to dismantle than one province at a time, as they are doing now.
That Possible Solutions section is a crock of shit. The real answer is to stop “starving the beast” and fund healthcare. This isn’t real journalism. It’s a propaganda piece.
I’m in the U.S., and have a bit of a permutation on this.
I live in a sparsely populated county. But we have two hospitals and hundreds of doctors.
However, my insurer pulled out of the county in May. So it’s a 70 mile drive to another county for urgent care.
I fell on Sunday and thought about making that drive. Instead, I decided to treat the injuries myself.
So we have plenty of open facilities. But it could easily cost $5,000 or so for routine treatment.
Doesn’t help that some hospitals seem to operate under a “throw the new guy under the bus instead of training them properly” philosophy. Thus encouraging more and more nurses to flee the country to earn more - for less work - in America.
Keep up the shit work Mr Ford. We need all the Canadian educated nurses we can get down here.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Clearly, nobody’s taking this seriously enough… These kinds of closures mean that government has failed to meet their end of the social contract for Canadians in terms of providing them assured access to quality emergency care,” said Drummond.
His closest emergency unit is in Chesley, run by the South Grey Bruce Health Centre, where he gets medical care and prescriptions renewed.
When your ER closes and patients can’t access care, the possibility of a poor outcome or something being missed, it goes up significantly," said Savage.
Experts told CTV they predict continuing ER closures because finding people to work there is the key problem, with Savage noting a large percentage are related to the nursing shortage.
Health is one of the biggest services provided by provincial and federal governments, and agencies were warned there was a looming shortage because of a growing and aging population, long before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Her team is also boosting training, using simulators to keep rural health workers’ skills up to date, and looking at putting doctors and nurses on the road.
The original article contains 1,595 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 89%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
For some reason at first glance I saw a ev charger in the picture
That’s great but not necessarily worth sharing.
