Canadian hospitals are in crisis. Across the country, its emergency departments (EDs) are overwhelmed, beds are overwhelmed, and patients are dying. This fall, an Angus Reid poll found that 29% of his adults report having “chronic difficulty” accessing health care. In Ontario, Canada’s largest province, a recent poll by Environics found that 80% of respondents believe the province’s healthcare system is at risk.
Across the country’s healthcare system, an influx of COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and flu patients is overwhelming understaffed facilities, including children’s hospitals. Many news reports suggest that the system’s inability to cope is a problem with too many patients in the wake of the COVID backlog, but in reality it’s a recurring problem. Looking back over the past few decades, we see that the emergency department in this country experiences this problem of too many patients and too few beds almost every five years.
The problem is not patient numbers. The problem is that decades of austerity have left the system bare.
Hospitals across Canada had to airlift patients, close emergency departments, and extend Consultation hours at family clinics, and subject patients to long and dangerous waiting times. According to reports available from the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI), the average ED wait time in Quebec is 4.9 hours. In Montreal, a mother made headlines after her young son had trouble breathing and waited 90 minutes for him to be treated. Emergency departments are so overwhelmed that state governments have launched a new app, Guichet d’accès à la première ligne, to direct people to their primary care physicians to ease the pressure on emergency care. The app was quickly overwhelmed with tens of thousands of calls.
In Ontario, after years of bed closures, the average wait time for an ED is 3.3 hours, according to CIHI. However, some hospitals have extended wait times up to 40 hours. Ambulance unloading time will also increase, in some cases up to 151 minutes.
According to CIHI, Manitoba has the longest average wait time in Canada at 5 hours. At Concordia Hospital in Winnipeg, the couple waited six hours in the ambulance waiting room, where she dealt with low temperatures and ambulance exhaust and was treated for pneumonia. In Saskatchewan, a Saskatchewan paramedic told his CTV News last month: Some have gone into cardiac arrest. “
In Alberta, during the worst of the fall flu season, average wait times were 3.1 hours, but as high as 17 hours at children’s hospitals, according to CIHI. Dr. Warren Thirsk told CTV News Edmonton, “There have been deaths of people sitting in the waiting room and dying in the waiting room.” I see them suffer countless hours out of fear of not knowing and being cared for.”
In New Brunswick, patients like 88-year-old Karen Totten were forced to wait in a supply closet for out-of-hospital care, according to CBC News. needs more care,” her daughter said.
The original purpose of the emergency department, as noted by the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (CAEP), was to evaluate and manage patients for a few hours. However, as CAEP further observed, ED congestion and lack of access “is not a new problem.”
Indeed, in the past 40 years, the problem has resurfaced in news headlines such as “Lawn Emergency Ward Approval” in 1987, “ER Congestion Worsening” in 1999, and “ER Overcrowding Delayed” in 2004. I was.
Since the introduction of Medicare across Canada, frivolous or “common complaints”, “elderly patients with nowhere else to go”, drunk driving, lack of “common sense” due to eggnog, poor parenting, opioid crisis, influenza, H1N1 , SARS, and more are blamed for ED “overcrowding”.
During this time, news outlets, government officials and think tanks have proposed various “measures” to reduce waiting times. However, these proposals are all lesser-variety austerity-inspired solutions.
In 1977, a report to the Metro Toronto Hospital Association suggested closing emergency departments at night and during “off-peak” hours to save beds during peak hours. In 1989, Ontario’s Emergency Care Program proposed that hospitals throughout Ottawa introduce a new “bed management” policy to “free up beds more quickly.” In the 1990s, Quebec’s “tactical intervention group” was empowered to act as a kind of “emergency room police”, sanctioning hospitals that allowed a patient to occupy her bed for more than 48 hours. .
Recently, Ontario liberals linked ED funding to shorter waiting times to launch a performance-based reward program while boasting the “lowest” per capita spending program of any province in Canada. introduced. Ontario joins other states to encourage “coach” hospitals to adopt “lean” management protocols to speed up medical facilities much like Toyota speeds up factory floors. I am supporting. This means endless searches for things like tracking nurses with a stopwatch, ‘savings’ in images and tests, ‘standardized’ staffing, and more.
With COVID-19 cases declining over the past year, a call to solve the crisis in the healthcare system has led to renewed calls for privatization and outsourcing procedures. The number of casualties outnumbers its resources, forcing a revision of its operating standards every ten years. “Overcrowded Hospital” is an appetizer.
As CAEP observed in 2002, “ED overcrowding is primarily a result of a shortage of inpatient beds . ED overcrowding does not occur when there are is not. These are acute and critical care patients, the primary responsibility and largest item in Canada’s healthcare budget.
As toronto star The current crisis is closely related to the reduction of medical resources. Canada had his 1,233 hospitals with 146,032 beds in 1952, five years before the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act came into force.
The Medicare Act of 1966 rapidly expanded Canada’s medical capacity, creating a 50/50 split between federal and provincial governments, especially in the area of hospital and bed construction. By 1970, however, the Federal Liberals were looking to cut the budget. The government’s 1970 Economic Council proposed measures to “discourse the use of health services,” even if they meant “deterrence fees.” In 1977, the 50/50 cost sharing program quietly came to an end, and transfers eroded over the decades that followed. This accelerated in the 1990s, when the Liberal Party implemented one of the toughest austerity programs in the developed world, cutting state transfer payments by nearly 50%.
The results of these cuts are clear. By 2015, Canada had 719 hospitals with 93,595 beds, down 514 from 1952. The country’s population in 1952 he was 14.5 million. In 2015, it was 35.7 million. Whatever the increase in capacity since 2015 was clearly not enough. According to the latest 2020 statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Canada has 702 hospitals with just 96,849 beds. According to CIHI data, the total number of beds increased by 20% from 76,250 in 2019-2020 to 91,511 in 2020-21, which is still below what has been seen in previous decades.
The current shortage comes amid negotiations of an upcoming health pact between the federal government and the states. The same prime minister eager to cut and privatize the health care system is asking for more money because the federal government has a larger tax base. However, this does not mean that the priority will change. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told his CBC News, “There is no point in throwing more money into a broken system.”
Canada’s universal health care system has been touted as Canada’s most “cherished institution” and a national treasure, but Canadian business owners and their politicians have consistently tried to limit, curtail, and weaken it. Liberal Trudeau and various right-wing Canadian prime ministers are just the latest iteration. After all, this is the playbook for all privatization advocates everywhere. They deplete public goods, wait for them to malfunction, and argue that a free market is needed to solve the problem.
Much is complicated about healthcare, but the current crisis is not. After decades of cuts, Canada’s public health care resources are inadequate to meet the needs of the general public. The crises and illnesses that lead people to ED may be complex and multifaceted, but these sectors are strained because they lack funding and resources. , we need resources for healthcare workers, services and patients.
