Newfoundland & Labrador

Newfoundland and Labrador Opinion

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OP-ED: Canada’s health-care crisis is personal, and it's getting harder to believe it can be fixed

Canada’s health-care crisis is no longer an abstract policy debate. It’s something you feel in your bones — in the hours spent waiting in emergency rooms, in the anxiety of not having a family doctor, in the helplessness of watching loved ones suffer while the system tells you to wait.

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I live in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, and like millions of Canadians, I don’t have a family physician. That reality hit me hard during my most recent visit to the city’s new “urgent care clinic,” a facility created specifically to take pressure off the Health Sciences Centre emergency room.

Urgent care opens at 8 a.m. I arrived at 7:20 a.m. with my three-year-old, and got into the queue behind a dozen or so people by 7:25 a.m. hoping to be seen early.

At 8 a.m. the door opened and I was handed Number 20, out of only 30 spots available for the entire day. Even then, after four and a half hours of waiting with a sick toddler, I was told there were still at least five people ahead of me and no clear timeline for when a physician might be able to see us.

At that point, I gave up. I picked up my child and drove to the Janeway Children’s Hospital ER, after hearing that the wait times there might be slightly better.

This is what “urgent care” looks like in Canada today: parents bouncing between facilities, hoping one of them might have the........

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