Earlier this year, the federal government gave the provinces and territories an immediate, unconditional $2-billion Canada Health Transfer on top of a record $198.6 billion to address immediate pressures on the health care system. But there were no strings attached on how it would be used.
“As a health-care team, we are disheartened, dispirited and have lost all hope that our leaders even understand the magnitude of the issues that face us. God help us all,” said veteran ER doctor Alan Drummond, the past president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. His group is calling for a national forum to come up with a cross-country plan to fix the problem fast.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The data shows that emergency visits, which dropped sharply early in 2020 because of pandemic restrictions, returned to largely traditional levels within a year but have since grown.
“This paper confirmed what a lot of us have seen on the front lines over the last two years,” said Dr. Catherine Varner, an ER doctor and deputy editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal who reviewed the study and wrote an accompanying editorial.
Emergency units are designed to work like a tube where patients go in and are quickly assessed, treated or moved to rehab, a hospital bed or home.
He and colleague Dr. Paul Atkinson from the department of emergency medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax tried to put a number on what they called a “hidden pandemic” of harm.
They used a formula devised by the U.K. Royal College of Emergency Medicine and The Economist to assess the increased delays in moving patients out of the ERsinto the hospital beds in that country.
More in-hospital beds is clearly one solution, Varner said, who points to data from the OECD showing Canada has among the lowest hospital bed-to-population ratios of some developed countries.
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