What’s more Canadian than waiting for hours in a hospital waiting room for treatment? Being forced to wait in a Tim Horton’s instead.
Hallway medicine is hitting new highs in congested Lower Mainland hospitals, as was demonstrated Monday night when Royal Columbian Hospital was forced to use its Tim Hortons outlet as an overflow ward.
Fraser Health officials say a combination of multiple trauma case airlifts earlier in the day and heavy pressure on the emergency department led staff to put patients in the hospital coffee shop.
It’s an unusual example of what has become a routine problem across the region: too many patients and not enough beds.
“Last night the hallways were two and three stretchers deep with patients,” said Dr. Sheldon Glazer, an emergency physician at Royal Columbian, the region’s trauma centre.
“This is just a natural progression of what we’ve been dealing with for a long, long time,” Glazer said. “We are forced to see patients in waiting rooms, in hallways and, now, in the Tim Hortons.”
The veteran ER doctor says halls jammed with stretchers are both inefficient and dangerous – particularly if a fire broke out.
Whenever the inevitable topic of wait times comes up in a discussion about healthcare, proponents of the socialist system will say, “Well, no system is perfect.” They’re absolutely correct. So assuming that the private and public system both have their flaws, which is preferable — having to spend money on insurance or medical care instead of having it for free? Or, dying while waiting for ‘free’ medical care? Seems like a simple decision to me.
Regarding my recent hospitalization, I stated — and still maintain — that I am not going to engage in a debate about healthcare, because my opinion still holds. However, despite the extraordinary emergency care I received, follow-up wait times were unacceptable. In the internal medicine unit, patients were being admitted who had been waiting in the emergency room for upwards of three and four days. Were they dying? No, but they certainly weren’t getting any healthier.
The Tim Horton’s spin on this story makes it more amusing, but being so backed up that you can’t even have patients in the waiting room is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Even under perfect circumstances, the province of British Columbia considers it a success if patients are admitted with less than 10 hours of waiting.
Remember, I had a stroke in a waiting room. But hey, at least I didn’t have to pay anything (just ended up hobbling around like an old lady with a walker, but whatever.)
H/T KonReport
