Alberta Politics & Government Thread 3.0

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

GGG, if you have read any of the many stories lately from HCW about how mangled the ER is, how they feel awful about not being able to provide care, how people are literally sitting on the floor in their own vomit waiting for care, you may re-evaluate your hunch that the system is worknig as designed. It is not.

I’m not saying their aren’t issues, but you don’t seem to be describing one. The ER is for life threatening situations. If you did not die then the system worked.

Perhaps others have a higher standard.

I think better non-hospital care for minor issues should be improved like draining an abscess. Any vet clinic can do it so why isn’t a doctors office.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by GGG

I’m not saying their aren’t issues, but you don’t seem to be describing one. The ER is for life threatening situations. If you did not die then the system worked.

Perhaps others have a higher standard.

I think better non-hospital care for minor issues should be improved like draining an abscess. Any vet clinic can do it so why isn’t a doctors office.

Waiting 10 hours in a room, especially one with sick people, is an issue.

What are you finding difficult to understand? Even your solution (better non-hospital care for minor issues) would solve the issue that was brought up, so you seem (in an abstract way) to acknowledge the existence of the issue. What’s confusing you?

[GGG]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Waiting 10 hours in a room, especially one with sick people, is an issue.

What are you finding difficult to understand? Even your solution (better non-hospital care for minor issues) would solve the issue that was brought up, so you seem (in an abstract way) to acknowledge the existence of the issue. What’s confusing you?

I’m not confused. I disagree that it is an issue. I’m suggesting that the purpose of an emergency room is to treat life or death emergencies and triaging cases that are satisfactorily resolved after 10 hrs of waiting is a reasonable standard for publicly funded healthcare.

The issues around emergency room care are things like ambulance crews being held because of not getting in resulting in no ambulances on the street.

So if someone lived and is complaining about a long wait they are complaining about the wrong service.

[Flames0910]

Originally Posted by Roughneck

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manit...hill-1.6635452

Manitoba premier puts other priorities ahead of Alberta's request to ship oil through Churchill



Strength to strength.

How's Danielle Smith supposed to standup to Ottawa when she gets so easily dismissed by the premier of Manitoba lol.

[Ozy_Flame]

Originally Posted by GGG

I’m not confused. I disagree that it is an issue. I’m suggesting that the purpose of an emergency room is to treat life or death emergencies and triaging cases that are satisfactorily resolved after 10 hrs of waiting is a reasonable standard for publicly funded healthcare.

What's your benchmark for why 10 is good? Triage level one is already in effect, level 2 is potential bad, 3 is like stitches, ab pain but not critical .... 4 is basically for vague complaints.

There's more nuance here than critical and non-critical, plus resources available impact it too (e.g. physicians available, beds, etc.)

[Cecil Terwilliger]

Originally Posted by GGG

I’m not confused. I disagree that it is an issue. I’m suggesting that the purpose of an emergency room is to treat life or death emergencies and triaging cases that are satisfactorily resolved after 10 hrs of waiting is a reasonable standard for publicly funded healthcare.

The issues around emergency room care are things like ambulance crews being held because of not getting in resulting in no ambulances on the street.

So if someone lived and is complaining about a long wait they are complaining about the wrong service.

Well your first problem is you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of emergency rooms. They do not exist solely to treat life and death situations and not dying is not in any way, shape or form a benchmark of whether or not the ER is performing its function.

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by GGG

I’m not confused. I disagree that it is an issue. I’m suggesting that the purpose of an emergency room is to treat life or death emergencies and triaging cases that are satisfactorily resolved after 10 hrs of waiting is a reasonable standard for publicly funded healthcare.

The issues around emergency room care are things like ambulance crews being held because of not getting in resulting in no ambulances on the street.

So if someone lived and is complaining about a long wait they are complaining about the wrong service.

They lived so they can’t complain about the wait? Really?

The purpose of the emergency room isn’t only to treat life or death emergencies, it’s to treat people who need unexpected acute care. The goal is, or it should be, to deliver that care as quickly as possible. The standard doesn’t change because a facility is publicly funded, but if it did that would actually make a pretty good argument against private healthcare since the standard there is if you have the money you might get treatment faster than at a publicly funded facility but if you don’t have the money you’ll never get treatment.

[calculoso]

Originally Posted by GGG

I’m not confused. I disagree that it is an issue. I’m suggesting that the purpose of an emergency room is to treat life or death emergencies and triaging cases that are satisfactorily resolved after 10 hrs of waiting is a reasonable standard for publicly funded healthcare.

I’d suggest that your believe is the purpose of an emergency room and what our healthcare system has designed and executes as the purpose of an emergency room … they are definitely two different things.

10 hours of waiting is never acceptable.

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by calculoso

I’d suggest that your believe is the purpose of an emergency room and what our healthcare system has designed and executes as the purpose of an emergency room … they are definitely two different things.

10 hours of waiting is never acceptable.

He's right about many people at the ER not needing ER level care. People who need burns dressed, stitches, a cast for a broken bone, etc all need care urgently, but don't need a full ER.

We don't have an alternative for them right now, but we should.

[calgarygeologist]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

He's right about many people at the ER not needing ER level care. People who need burns dressed, stitches, a cast for a broken bone, etc all need care urgently, but don't need a full ER.

We don't have an alternative for them right now, but we should.

We live close enough to Cochrane that my significant other has used the urgent care centre there instead of going to Foothills or elsewhere and it is usually much quicker.

[calculoso]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

He's right about many people at the ER not needing ER level care. People who need burns dressed, stitches, a cast for a broken bone, etc all need care urgently, but don't need a full ER.

We don't have an alternative for them right now, but we should.

Hence my comment about how the system is designed and executes…

What you and I and GGG think an ER *should be* does not match what actually is.

If the AB/ON governments wanted ERs to be only for emergencies, they would be. As it is, they are a collection place and dumping ground for everything.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by GGG

I’m not confused. I disagree that it is an issue. I’m suggesting that the purpose of an emergency room is to treat life or death emergencies and triaging cases that are satisfactorily resolved after 10 hrs of waiting is a reasonable standard for publicly funded healthcare.

The issues around emergency room care are things like ambulance crews being held because of not getting in resulting in no ambulances on the street.

So if someone lived and is complaining about a long wait they are complaining about the wrong service.

The service they’re complaining about is healthcare, which service should they be complaining about?

If someone is waiting 10 hours, that’s a failure. It’s unreasonable. If in a situation where you are waiting 10 hours in an emergency room, the failure is not that you didn’t receive care at the emergency room fast enough, it’s that you ended up there in the first place (a place you obviously at that point should not have been) and there is no effective method to move you to an alternative care path.

You’re pretending that the purpose of emergency rooms is the same as the way that emergency rooms actually function, or you’re confusing the former and the latter (but you say you are not confused).

It’s not a failure of the emergency room that a non-emergency was successfully moved through the emergency room slowly. The failure is in the system, that:
1. They were there when they shouldn’t be
1b. They’re often not there because they mistook a non-emergency for an emergency, but because they were sent there by a healthcare provider
2. There is no capability to move non-emergencies to alternative care paths
3. The above combines for people filling up (and therefore waiting 10 hours in) emergency rooms they don’t need to be in

So you obviously are confused, or out of touch. This isn’t buying concert tickets in 1995 or waiting for the first iPhone. There’s no reason to spend 10 hours over night waiting to get a boil lanced. Be serious.

[calf]

Imagine waiting anywhere for 10 hours, say from 7pm to 5am on a Saturday night
... then add in a sick and miserable kid on top of that, with minimal food/drink/entertainment/rest options
... then add in dozens of others in the same situation and crowded waiting room


And that posted wait time is the wait to be seen by a dr. If you need x-rays or any other work done it could be many hours on top of that too.

That's all I got. That's not a system functioning as it should.

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by calf

Imagine waiting anywhere for 10 hours, say from 7pm to 5am on a Saturday night
... then add in a sick and miserable kid on top of that, with minimal food/drink/entertainment/rest options
... then add in dozens of others in the same situation and crowded waiting room


And that posted wait time is the wait to be seen by a dr. If you need x-rays or any other work done it could be many hours on top of that too.

That's all I got. That's not a system functioning as it should.

Unless the goal is to see the system fail, in which case one could argue that everything appears to be going according to plan.

[Slava]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

He's right about many people at the ER not needing ER level care. People who need burns dressed, stitches, a cast for a broken bone, etc all need care urgently, but don't need a full ER.

We don't have an alternative for them right now, but we should.

But this is the crux of the healthcare issue. Say you have one of those things tonight at 7:30pm. That's far from an ungodly hour, and yet you have the ER to go to and almost nothing else. Need a CT scan, or whatever at 8pm? ER. Is it life threatening? Maybe not, but you have no options on where to go, essentially.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Slava

But this is the crux of the healthcare issue. Say you have one of those things tonight at 7:30pm. That's far from an ungodly hour, and yet you have the ER to go to and almost nothing else. Need a CT scan, or whatever at 8pm? ER. Is it life threatening? Maybe not, but you have no options on where to go, essentially.

Ya, I had something in my eye after hours on a Friday night. Incredibly painful, not life threatening, but no where else to go. GGG imagines I should sit around and wait until Monday to go to my optometrist, I guess? Maybe by then my cornea would be scratched to pieces and I'd be an even bigger expense on the system.

Quick access to care for many things is incredibly important at keeping treatment costs lower for issues in the future. A crowded dysfunctional ER is just costing us more money. It's failure.

[calf]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

Unless the goal is to see the system fail, in which case one could argue that everything appears to be going according to plan.

Are you trying to tell me when they say they don't want to leave debt for my children, it's not actually about my children's best interests?

[Locke]

Good news everyone! Fear not! The Provinces have released radio ads imploring the Federal Government to release more funds for Health Care!

Help is on the way!

And if you havent heard the ad, it doesnt appear to be Alberta specific but rather all of the Provinces together.

So, can we safely say that the 10 hour ER waits are Trudeau's fault?

[Locke]

Originally Posted by calf

Are you trying to tell me when they say they don't want to leave debt for my children, it's not actually about my children's best interests?

Well. I guess it depends on whether you believe 'them' or not. Because I'd say that is a bald and obvious lie.

Thats like being held at gunpoint by a serial killer and he says to you he says:

"I dont necessarily 'want' to kill you, but here we are. Guess what happens next?"

[GGG]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

They lived so they can’t complain about the wait? Really?

The purpose of the emergency room isn’t only to treat life or death emergencies, it’s to treat people who need unexpected acute care. The goal is, or it should be, to deliver that care as quickly as possible. The standard doesn’t change because a facility is publicly funded, but if it did that would actually make a pretty good argument against private healthcare since the standard there is if you have the money you might get treatment faster than at a publicly funded facility but if you don’t have the money you’ll never get treatment.

As a public system we should have a minimum level of care the state provides for people at no additional cost than taxation. We should be having a robust debate on where that point is. 10 hrs for non-life threatening urgent care after hours is a reasonable standard for government to provide.

And as you reply you should have considered what length of time you would like to wait and the level of taxation required to support your requirements in all areas of the health system.