| About three weeks ago, Premier Ed Stelmach’s five-year plan for Alberta arrived in my mailbox. The cover of the pamphlet was a typical Alberta scene — golden fields of grain reaching to the horizon and a blue, blue sky. Inside, there were photos of Albertans — seniors, young families, children – everyone smiling and seemingly content.
Shortly after, I began an intense medical adventure thanks to an obstinate kidney stone and found myself thrown into a completely different Alberta than the one pictured in the premier’s propaganda. A kidney stone on the move is extremely unpleasant. So much so, that morphine was the only medication that relieved my pain. A person gets dehydrated, and infection can set in. If it doesn’t pass on its own, the stone has to be removed surgically.
Of course I knew very little about any of this when the pain set in on a Sunday evening. But by Monday afternoon I knew I had to get help and went to the CHR’s downtown urgent care clinic at 8 Ave. and 8 St. S.W. After being treated for a few hours, I felt a whole lot better and went home. But by the next day it was clear the episode wasn’t over. I went to Foothills Emergency. I spent several hours there before being transferred in the middle of the night to the Rockyview for surgery the next morning.
Everything went well. I am completely recovered and still marvelling at the efficiencies of modern medicine and health care workers who give their all despite difficult circumstances. I have no complaints about how long I had to wait, how I was treated or the eventual outcome of this medical adventure. Nevertheless, this was an eye-opening experience. And what I saw, as a patient, during that three-day whirlwind tour of three of Calgary’s prime medical facilities made me angry and ashamed to be an Albertan.
I came away wondering who would ever want to be a triage nurse in a Calgary hospital? When you have a waiting room full of sick and/or injured people, who would want to have to make decisions about who gets to see a doctor before someone else? Who would want, day after day, to tell people in obvious pain that they are going to have to sit in a chair and wait who knows how long because there are no emergency beds available?
Who would want to be an emergency department doctor? Running from patient to patient, one ear listening for announcements about ambulances bringing in victims of serious accidents, violent crimes, heart attacks and drug overdoses.
And then, of course, there are the patients, and it is the patients who stick in my mind more than anyone else. An elderly woman screaming with pain from a broken hip. She would have to have an emergency hip replacement the next day. A Cambodian restaurant worker who spoke very little English and suffering serious burns to his hands and face from a kitchen fire. He wouldn’t be going back to work for awhile. Another elderly woman who had taken a serious fall and was to be transferred to the Fanning Centre for transitional care. "How much will that cost?" I heard her daughter say. The doctor carefully explained that it would be covered by medicare – until she was moved to a long-term care facility. Personal dramas, life-changing moments. Some patients had friends and family with them, others were alone. A lot of people were in agony.
There will always be a need for hospital emergency departments as well as urgent-care walk-in clinics. Life happens. But in Calgary, it seems people in our hospital emergency departments suffer much more than is necessary. There are simply too many people needing help and too few health care workers and resources on hand.
We all know why this is so. The Calgary Health Region with full support from the Klein government closed three hospitals in Calgary in the 1990s. Two of them — the Holy Cross and the General had emergency departments. The government then went on to gut public health care even further. Many physicians, surgeons and nurses left in despair (my GP was one of them). So now there aren’t enough family doctors, specialists or nurses.
That was bad enough. But then the Klein government started ramping up oilsands development. It gave the thumbs-up to mega-projects that it knew would need thousands of workers who would have to come from somewhere else. Construction workers, office workers, service workers have flooded into Calgary. And yet that same government made no plans to accommodate the extra pressure on hospitals and the health care system in general. Just as it made no plans for more affordable housing, which means more people living in shelters and on the streets. In other words, bring on the workers – and then let them, and the people who are already here, fend for themselves, even though the provincial treasury is raking in billions of dollars.
Alberta Progressive Conservatives need to be soundly punished for what they have wrought; for their total disregard for the health and welfare of Albertans. Those who were at Ralph Klein’s side cheering him on (and that includes Ed Stelmach) and those who remained silent for fear of crossing him, need to know that they cannot get away with what they did. We will have an election within a year. The Alberta Tories should be booted out. That’s a five-year plan that might actually work.
Gillian Steward is the publisher of Alberta Views. |
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