At a time when health care in Canada is more fragile than ever, The Globe spoke with five Canadians from across the country about their most recent trip to the emergency room
that there is a crisis in family medicine, as many of its members are burnt out, overburdened, frustrated and demoralized. More are retiring, the College said, while fewer medical students are choosing to enter family practice.
Since diagnosed with lung cancer in April, Mr. Collins, 52, said he’s been doing a lot of waiting for appointments, once as long as 4½ hours. The experience was “pretty traumatizing,” he said. He’s annoyed at politicians for failing to keep promises to end hallway medicine and for not compensating nurses adequately.
Ji Yoon Han outside her home in Montreal on July 15. Han recounts finding herself in one of the city’s overcrowded emergency rooms when she had just arrived in the city.After taking an Uber to the city’s CHUM mega-hospital, she arrived around 1:30 in the morning of July 1. In the packed waiting room she took a slip, which was soon covered in her blood, and tried to remember her French numbers as they were called over the intercom. “I must have looked really pitiful,” she said.
When she was finally summoned to the examination room, 30 minutes later, she was only the second person to leave the waiting room since she arrived two hours earlier. One man in a wheelchair told her he had been there since 6 p.m. “One thing that was very memorable to me when I walked out was that the crowd in the emergency room was the exact same,” she said. “I felt almost survivor’s guilt.”Graham Mosimann didn’t need a morning alarm on June 19. The “excruciating, wake-up-screaming” pain coming from his shoulder was enough to launch him out of bed at 6 a.m.
His options were limited, so he checked emergency room wait times in the city despite feeling like it wasn’t the appropriate place to go for his injury. They ranged between five and six hours. He briefly considered going to Stoney Plain, about 40 minutes west of the city, but decided it would be unnecessarily painful to drive – especially since his vehicle had standard transmission.
After sitting there, with a sick child, for nearly five hours, Mr. Zhang gave up, taking his son home around 11:30 p.m. Mr. Zhang praised the professionalism of the medical staff, but “just the wait,” he said, “it’s a headache”.Health care workers were stumped about what was wrong with Lea-Ann Poehl. For two years, she’d been plagued with recurring abdominal issues and had lost about one-third of her body weight. Was it pancreatitis? Hyperthyroidism? Each time she went to the ER, there was a different guess at what she might be suffering from.
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