Quote:
As emergency doctors we have front row seats to a critical system-wide healthcare crisis in Alberta. Despite our best efforts to provide comprehensive and accessible care 24-hours a day, 7-days a week, we are increasingly unable to do so. We are writing this letter to add our voices to the growing concerns of the state of healthcare in our province and as a call for action.
Signs of a capacity crisis are everywhere. The wait time in Calgary’s Emergency Departments has skyrocketed, with patients sometimes waiting up to 15 hours to be seen by a doctor. These patients often become sicker while waiting. We worry about these patients every shift. It is now common to have 40 to 50 people waiting to be seen by a doctor at any given time in any of our emergency waiting rooms. Frail, elderly patients languish on stretchers in hospital hallways. Patients with mental health crises are housed in the emergency room, often for several days, while awaiting inpatient beds. Sections of our emergency departments are routinely closed due to a lack of our highly skilled specialized emergency nurses. Increasingly, there are gaps without surgical and cardiac specialist coverage in our city’s hospitals. While all of this is occurring in Alberta’s largest city, we are regularly asked to consider covering rural sites who are equally suffering with staffing shortages and intermittent closures of their urgent care and emergency departments.
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...LcPNSfipk/edit
This is a letter signed by 190 Calgary ER doctors, and is a must read for any who believed Smith when she said she fixed healthcare. It lays out the problems clearly, and how the UCP contributed to them. This government is failing, and our system is in real trouble.
Please consider this when you vote, because you never know when you will need the ER, and when you do, you'll find out just what kind of hell it can be. You will wonder when it is your turn. You'll watch the wait time clock increase in 45 minute jumps. You'll wander to the washroom, to see a hallway full of patients on stretchers, moaning, or motionless, awaiting help that is hours away. You'll see a limited staff doing their best to care for the ill, but unable to keep up. You will see endless desperation from both sides of the counter, and you'll wonder why the government allows this to happen. And it will be because you gave them permission. Stop the suffering.