Long wait times a symptom of an underfunded and often neglected system
At a press conference held Tuesday morning at St. Mary’s General Hospital in Kitchener, Ont., Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced funding for a new cardiac catheterization lab. But the event took a turn when local media shifted the focus towards a pressing and widespread concern: the alarmingly long wait times for critical care in Ontario hospitals.
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The timely questions posed to the minister came in the wake of my viral social media plea, begging the minister to make much-needed investments in Ontario’s public health-care system. The post was written while I sat helplessly in the waiting room of that same hospital just a day prior, while my daughter, who was diagnosed with appendicitis, was forced to sit and wait, putting pressure on her swollen appendix, for nearly 19 hours, until a bed and surgery room were eventually found at another hospital.
My daughter’s ordeal has a happy ending, eventually receiving surgery just before 5 p.m. at an adjacent hospital, but the process of getting that surgery was far more arduous than I ever would have imagined. When we arrived at the hospital at 10 p.m. the night prior, we were promptly provided with a bed and periodic evaluations by a physician. By the time we received our 10 a.m. diagnosis, we had long been required to forfeit our bed for another patient and hadn’t spoken to a physician in more than six hours.
It was then we were informed that the hospital was incapable of performing the required surgery, and no beds were available at an alternative hospital capable of the procedure. We were told we couldn’t even briefly return home to sleep for a few hours, and were instead required to sit — not lie down — in the crowded waiting room until space became available.
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I desperately asked when a transfer would be provisioned, but the nursing staff had no idea if it would be hours, or even that same day. My daughter wept quietly while she reconciled the piercing pain in her abdomen, her sleepless night in the hospital and her uncertain path to a surgery she both dreaded and wished would arrive without delay.
Our online plea clearly struck a chord with Canadians, amassing thousands of shares and nearly a million views in the days following the incident. The post, which tagged Minister Jones, ignited a wave of public outrage. Thousands of people voiced their frustrations, pointing fingers at the minister and lamenting a health-care system perceived as increasingly dysfunctional with each passing year.
In no way do I believe my daughter’s harrowing experience was particularly remarkable — it’s long been the status quo in Canadian health care. If for a second I believed that St. Mary’s was an outlier, I would not have hesitated in directing my frustration squarely at its management. But anyone who’s discussed emergency room capacity with an off-duty nurse or doctor knows that neglect like we experienced is par for the course across the country.
That’s a problem for patients trying to access health services today, but it’s perhaps even more concerning for the patients of the future. What aspiring nurse or doctor would willingly choose a career path so fraught with disheartening challenges, where the struggle to provide adequate care in the face of overwhelming patient volume is a constant? I can only presume that this situation dissuades aspiring health-care professionals from entering this beleaguered profession, including aspiring nurses like my daughter.
Any fanciful conceptions my daughter might have held about this profession were shattered after witnessing the sheer panic, exhaustion and powerlessness on display by the nursing staff at St. Mary’s hospital. In a social media reflection, my daughter later wrote, “I want to be a nurse and I wanted to work in the emergency room but I never want to set foot in an emergency room as a nurse now. The nurses are pretty much left helpless and I never want to have to watch people experience the same thing I did.”
That’s not the message Ontario ought to send to the next generation. The nursing staff’s dedication to their profession remained on display at St. Mary’s amid their frantic scramble. The nurses, once learning of my daughter’s aspiration to join their ranks, began taking extra time to explain their actions as they drew blood, inserted her IV catheter and administered her antibiotics.
One nurse, in a lighthearted yet poignant comment, encouraged her to “get through school fast. We need you.” When I expressed to another nurse my growing intention to write a column about our experience, she replied, “Yes, please do! People need to know what is happening.”
It was with this in mind that I posted my plea to the minister, and later sent her office my daughter’s change of heart on the prospective career she had been pursuing. I haven’t yet heard back, but when asked during the press conference about my family’s distressing experience with emergency surgery, Minister Jones said, “I think we’ve all — as parents, as family members — had those very stressful moments where we don’t know what’s wrong with your loved one and you just want a solution.”
She also suggested she is open to meeting my daughter, though to date we’ve received no response to our inquiry. Nevertheless, my daughter is thrilled about the possibility of supporting the minister in finding real solutions. That help is surely needed, as the minister missed the mark when she equated our experience with “moments when we don’t know what’s wrong with our loved ones.”
It’s scary not to know what’s wrong, but it’s calamitous to know precisely what isn’t working and to be helpless to do anything about it. It took just hours to determine what was wrong with my daughter’s abdomen, but the issue was that our health-care system was unable to take the measures necessary to correct the problem for far too long. If anything, that should be the easier problem to fix, as it requires no further medical knowledge — just more investment in a system that’s critical for all Ontarians.
The diagnosis in Canadian emergency rooms is clear: we know precisely what isn’t working and why long wait times have become the norm. Our hospitals are staffed with talented and dedicated professionals whose fault is merely being far too sparse in number and being provided far too few physical resources to support a growing population. All we need now is for governments to take their commitment to fix the problem seriously.
National Post
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