Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston warns Canada’s health care system is “on the ropes.”
“There is not a community in this country where the headline story is not about something in the health care system. Our nationwide Medicare system is on the ropes,” he told Global News’ David Akin in an interview broadcast on The West Block.
“I believe in the public system and I think we can work together as provinces with the federal government to save our Medicare system.”
Houston’s comments come amid devastating recent weeks for two families in Nova Scotia.
After waiting seven hours in a Nova Scotia emergency room on Dec. 30, Charlene Snow went home. She decided she would try an outpatient clinic in the morning, her family said. But before nightfall, she died.
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At first her family was devastated. Then they got angry – and that anger turned into action.
With hospital overcrowding causing excruciating emergency room wait times, Charlene’s sister-in-law, Kathryn Snow, decided she “didn’t want (Charlene) to be another statistic.” So she started a website called Nova Scotia Healthcare Crisis, which hopes to encourage Nova Scotians with similar experiences to share their stories.
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Just one day after Charlene Snow’s death, Alison Holthoff, 37, died in the emergency room at Cumberland Regional Health Center — after waiting seven hours in excruciating pain, according to her husband.
There were 558 emergency room deaths in Nova Scotia last year and now the Nova Scotia NDP is calling for an investigation.
2:05 Another Nova Scotia woman dies after 7-hour wait in emergency room, family says
Houston says he takes it “very personally” when someone gets lost in “tragic situations” like those that have made headlines recently, he said.
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“I carry this very strongly, very strongly, on a deeply personal level,” he said.
Still, he said, there are people working day in and day out in these hospitals who are “saving lives.”
“They just can’t save them all,” Houston said. “Emergency rooms are of that nature.”
Health workers on the front lines of the crisis are also sounding the alarm.
“Our emergency facilities where we work don’t seem to have enough capacity to manage all the emergency care that comes into our hospitals,” said Dr. Michael Howlett of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, speaking on West Block’s Interview with David Akin of Global News.
“Overcrowding in the emergency room is the number one problem.”
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The health care crisis is not specific to Nova Scotia, Howlett added.
“The problems we face are actually national and international in scope,” he said.
“We have a large number of patients who are admitted to the hospital who can’t get out of the emergency room and into hospital beds, and that creates a backlog.”
1:53 Nova Scotia health advocate wonders ‘when is the tipping point’ after ER deaths
Wait times increased in Ontario last year, where data released by Health Quality Ontario (HQO), part of Ontario Health, showed patients waited an average of 20.7 hours to be admitted to the hospital from the emergency department in July .
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A children’s hospital in British Columbia had to release guidelines for when to take your child to the emergency room because of the steep wait times.
Hospital emergency rooms across the country — from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland and Labrador — had to temporarily close their doors this summer.
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Part of the problem is a lack of care in the community, according to Howlett’s West Block co-panelist Dr. Alika LaFontaine of the Canadian Medical Association.
There was a time, according to LaFontaine, when Canadians visited a family doctor or clinic before resorting to an emergency room visit. But now, he said, “all those places are completely overwhelmed.”
“So people really only have an option to go to the emergency room.”
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Meanwhile, health workers on the front lines of this crisis are burning out, doctors said.
“The workload is too much … we’ve seen this mass exodus,” Howlett said.
The fact that health care is a provincial responsibility, LaFontaine added, means that Canada has a patchwork of health care systems, each competing with one another to hire the best staff.
“We have a competitive model versus a collaborative model,” he said. “We really have 13 health care systems that operate in isolation for the most part unless they choose to overlap.”
What can be done about it?
Overcrowding in emergency rooms is the biggest problem facing health care, Howlett said, but there simply aren’t enough workers to help everyone who needs it.
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“We have far more patients being cared for by too few caregivers,” he said.
Provinces and territories should work together, Lafontaine said, rather than compete against each other to attract health workers to their hospitals.
That way, “we can not only track the problems, but also the needs of the patients and match those things in a more sensible way.”
1:58 Nova Scotia NDP calls for investigation into emergency room deaths
Many provinces made cuts to their health care systems that reduced their capacity, LaFontaine said, because they weren’t collecting or sharing data on the ramifications of those elections across the country.
“We didn’t know — because we didn’t have the data, we weren’t collecting it or sharing it — how dire the situation was going to be right now,” he said.
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“So now that we’re in this situation, what’s the solution? It’s a nationwide collaboration.
Canada also needs to boost its community care options, Howlett added, as that would allow emergency room beds to open sooner.
People in emergency care “weak for weeks and months,” he said, even though they no longer need emergency treatment. This is because there are insufficient resources in the community to address this health care gap.
“We haven’t planned well enough over the last 20, 30 years to make sure these people can get out of the hospital,” he said.
“On any given day, 10 to 25 percent of hospital beds are occupied by people who do not need emergency care.”
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To help ease pressure from the issue, Houston said he was “absolutely” open to allowing some privatized health services in the province.
However, health care privatization has proven a controversial topic in Canada, with opponents warning that it will create inequities, cost more and compromise the quality of care.
“If there’s someone who can provide the care, then let’s provide it,” Houston said.
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Meanwhile, after making good on health care promises during the provincial election a year ago, Houston said his government has released a health action plan that has been updated online with the latest efforts to address the problem.
But, Houston said, fixing the system will “take money” and “take time.”
“The state of the health care system today is something that has evolved over years, decades, really. We have been on this crash course for a long time. So it will take time to fix it,” he explained.
“We are fully focused on fixing this health care situation and our resolve is now stronger than ever. We know there’s a lot of pressure, but we know we can get there.”
— with files from Global News’ Karla Renić
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