Western Standard - July 25, 2024


Overcrowded hospitals need to change their mandates

Topics
overcrowded hospitals dedicated long-term facilities
Make some space in Canada's hospitals Alberta Wildfire Update： Current Challenges and Responses

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

212.11

Word count

1,129

Sentence count

73

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

It s a hard subject, but it s one that we re seeing constantly in the headlines: "Hospitals, they re overwhelmed, emergency rooms are overwhelmed, people can t get in, people are dying in the hallways." It s the same in every province, and it s across the country. And that s because of Canada s socialized healthcare monopoly system. Access to care in a timely manner is always going to be a problem until the entire system is reformed. In the meantime, though, there are things that can be done to ease the pressure in the hospitals without digging into and amending the Canada Health Act, things to do on the way to real reforms.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 And it's a hard subject, but it's one that we're seeing constantly, headlines saying, you know, the hospitals, they're overwhelmed, emergency rooms are overwhelmed, people can't get treatment, people can't get in, people are dying in the hallways.
00:00:11.860 It's the same in every province.
00:00:13.860 The hospitals and emergency rooms, they're overwhelmed, and it's across the country.
00:00:17.860 And that's because of Canada's socialized healthcare monopoly system. 0.62
00:00:21.120 Access to care in a timely manner is always going to be a problem until the entire system is reformed.
00:00:26.900 In the meantime, though, there are things that can be done to ease the pressure in the hospitals without digging into and amending the Canada Health Act, things to do on the way to real reforms.
00:00:37.260 Now, for myself, I've shared a bit of that on here.
00:00:39.400 I've had a pretty rough year as far as the health of my family members go.
00:00:42.960 And it's led to me having spent more time in hospital emergency rooms in one year than I've spent my entire life.
00:00:47.940 Things just seem to happen in waves.
00:00:49.580 That's life.
00:00:50.720 At least it certainly gave me a perspective on things, though.
00:00:53.160 And in multiple hospitals, the emergency rooms all look the same.
00:00:56.200 They're overcrowded with suffering people, while exhausted, harried staff try to keep up.
00:01:01.740 I was at the Foothills Hospital last month.
00:01:03.400 It's a Calgary one, and it's huge, because an elderly family member had had a stroke.
00:01:07.640 And the scene was like something from the movies.
00:01:09.580 The waiting area was packed with people in the emergency area.
00:01:13.020 And once you got into the treatment area, there were literally people suffering and lined up on gurneys in the hallways waiting for help.
00:01:20.060 It's what you'd expect to see after a major disaster or something, but this was just a typical afternoon.
00:01:24.440 And to take some of the pressure from those hospitals, we have to start identifying who really needs to be there and who doesn't.
00:01:31.760 Because Canada's system packs so many services into hospitals, they become overwhelmed because they're trying to be everything to everybody, rather than the acute care centers they're supposed to be.
00:01:41.500 I want to start with mental health services.
00:01:42.940 They have to be decoupled from general hospitals.
00:01:46.580 I mean, due to decades of the misplaced movement of deinstitutionalization, we have thousands of people who should be receiving long-term mental health care, and they're on the streets quite often.
00:01:56.400 They're in no condition to manage themselves in this naive community living system we've set up.
00:02:01.380 And they either end up in the streets, in jail, dead, or in hospitals.
00:02:05.160 If somebody needs mental health treatment, I mean, if you haven't had to encounter it, you never really think of it until the time comes.
00:02:11.120 But if you hit a crisis, what happens?
00:02:13.220 Well, hospitals, they're the only entry point for mental health care.
00:02:17.300 So if somebody's had a mental health, you know, a breakdown or an episode, they're forced to head to an emergency room to await help.
00:02:22.580 That's assuming somebody will take them there.
00:02:24.300 Last year, my father had a mental collapse.
00:02:27.060 He was paranoid, delusional, prone to wandering.
00:02:30.400 Couldn't just leave him.
00:02:31.140 He couldn't help himself.
00:02:32.020 He came on suddenly, and for his safety, we needed to get him into care.
00:02:36.260 It took rotating shifts of family members to stay with him in the emergency room for 23 hours before he was admitted.
00:02:42.600 Then he was medicated, placed on a gurney in a hallway for two days before they could get a bed in the psychiatric unit.
00:02:48.700 He spent 40 days in that unit.
00:02:50.600 It's a sparsely equipped wing in the hospital.
00:02:52.840 Staff were excellent, and they did what they could with him.
00:02:55.180 And with the rest of the challenging patients, of course, within that unit.
00:02:57.540 But it was clear that the space is transitional and couldn't offer long-term care,
00:03:01.500 which most of the people there actually needed.
00:03:03.540 They were committed there.
00:03:05.000 They usually end up getting discharged, though, within days.
00:03:07.520 And if they don't have family to help, they often end up on the streets.
00:03:10.780 Even if they do have family to help out, sometimes they end up on the streets.
00:03:13.200 Most mentally ill people who go to the hospital, they never even get to the psychiatric ward.
00:03:18.060 They're given a prescription and a brochure listing community supports and, you know, hope that things work well for you.
00:03:26.280 Good luck.
00:03:26.740 And it's not that the doctors are heartless.
00:03:28.340 They just have nowhere else to put people.
00:03:30.420 It's unfair, expensive, and ineffective pushing psychiatric patients through general hospitals.
00:03:35.600 The doctor who can set a broken arm likely isn't well-trained to deal with a schizophrenic, but that's what they're tasked with.
00:03:41.600 For people awaiting care for injuries, it's not pleasant spending hours in a waiting room with a person who's melting down with a bipolar disorder.
00:03:47.660 An emergency room setting, of course, isn't very comfortable for a person suffering from a mental health issue either.
00:03:52.660 We need mental health facilities separate from general hospitals, both for the intake and the long-term care.
00:03:58.940 Yes, we need to expand our psychiatric institutions rather than closing them as we have been.
00:04:03.600 And I know we don't like to think of having people confined, but I assure you it's more humane than having them in jail, homeless shelters, or in the general hospitals.
00:04:12.200 And, of course, it's going to take pressure away from those emergency rooms.
00:04:15.340 Likewise, we need fast and separate inpatient care for addicts.
00:04:18.580 They're showing up in emergency rooms, and they can't be effectively treated there, but they don't know where else to go.
00:04:24.120 Hospitals are often being used as well as nursing homes when seniors without family advocates find themselves in need of care but hadn't planned for long-term care homes.
00:04:32.520 It's a very expensive and unpleasant way for a senior to spend their final years.
00:04:36.540 And then, again, we can look into things.
00:04:38.040 Expand options for practical nurses and general practitioners so we can reduce these emergency room loads.
00:04:42.820 Many people with minor ailments head to the emergency rooms when they can be better treated elsewhere, but they don't necessarily know where to go.
00:04:49.320 Creating new facilities and options, it sounds expensive, but let's not pretend we aren't already paying for it.
00:04:54.120 The addicted, the mentally unsound, they're already in our facilities, but they aren't getting the best treatment we could.
00:04:59.480 Dedicated long-term facilities can house and treat people with mental health, addiction, and age-related issues much more effectively and at a lower cost than general hospitals can.
00:05:08.700 We don't need to reinvent the wheel to take the pressure from our emergency rooms.
00:05:12.320 We just need to rethink the centralized model that packs everybody into one place for treatment.
00:05:18.520 It just doesn't work.