1y ago

Toronto patient waiting for hospital bed watched for 48 hours as ER staff dealt with flood of sick patients

www.ctvnews.ca Toronto patient waiting for hospital bed watched for 48 hours as ER staff dealt with flood of sick patients

Some doctors estimate 8,000 to 15,000 Canadians are dying because of emergency room overcrowding, a trend prompting hospital staff to get creative, treating patients everywhere from chairs to public bathrooms.

Earlier this year, the federal government gave the provinces and territories an immediate, unconditional $2-billion Canada Health Transfer on top of a record $198.6 billion to address immediate pressures on the health care system. But there were no strings attached on how it would be used.

"As a health-care team, we are disheartened, dispirited and have lost all hope that our leaders even understand the magnitude of the issues that face us. God help us all," said veteran ER doctor Alan Drummond, the past president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. His group is calling for a national forum to come up with a cross-country plan to fix the problem fast.

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But there were no strings attached on how it would be used.
None of Canada's premiers were willing to sign a document that locked those funds into healthcare spending alone. So essentially they can be used for anything a provincial gov't wants to spend money on ... like Ontario's greenbelt, BC's fires, or even just to give themselves raises.
Only we can hold ALL of them accountable on this.
- Only guillotines can hold the bourgeoisie accountable.
  
  I would respectfully disagree and instead propose waterboarding with chocolate milk, 1984-style. That way, we can simultaneously cover the last meal on the cheap, as Dougie would have wanted.
- Do we know it was all of them? As I recall they collectively put out a statement put out by the premiers, but not necessarily unanimously.
  
  Federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos maintained Friday that those priorities are not conditions for further health funding increases, as the premiers continue to demand a major boost in dollars without strings attached.

Conservative government is trying to break health care.
This allows their cronies to set up private health care for crazy profits.
You know? The American model?

Who knew that severely underfunding healthcare would cause bad healthcare
Now let's finish the paperwork to create private healthcare companies. Start building some clinics, making sure our friends get all of those sweet government construction contracts. We can even use taxpayer money to fund all of this.
- Had me in the first half. For anyone else who didn't catch the inflection, there was a /s at the end there.

I won't why the massive amounts of money that was aimed towards healthcare but was essentially a blank check didn't end up going to healthcare?
- Because the conservative premiers insisted that it be no strings attached so they could either sit on it, make tax cuts with it, or implement greed based health care.
  
  Don't forget withholding a billion dollars that they already budgeted and agreed to spend on health care.

Thanks, but the article doesn't mention that it was Alberta, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Sask that were the primary forces behind the no strings. BC, unlike them, actually used the covid funding for its intended purpose.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
The data shows that emergency visits, which dropped sharply early in 2020 because of pandemic restrictions, returned to largely traditional levels within a year but have since grown.
"This paper confirmed what a lot of us have seen on the front lines over the last two years," said Dr. Catherine Varner, an ER doctor and deputy editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal who reviewed the study and wrote an accompanying editorial.
Emergency units are designed to work like a tube where patients go in and are quickly assessed, treated or moved to rehab, a hospital bed or home.
He and colleague Dr. Paul Atkinson from the department of emergency medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax tried to put a number on what they called a "hidden pandemic" of harm.
They used a formula devised by the U.K. Royal College of Emergency Medicine and The Economist to assess the increased delays in moving patients out of the ERsinto the hospital beds in that country.
More in-hospital beds is clearly one solution, Varner said, who points to data from the OECD showing Canada has among the lowest hospital bed-to-population ratios of some developed countries.
The original article contains 1,622 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Boarding in the ER is not uncommon in the states, but we don't often leave them for days in the hallway.

14 comments