Allow a parenthesis in the very real psychodrama of the grandiloquent threats of “economic” annexation of Canada launched by the American president-elect, Donald Trump. Because life goes on…
So, across Quebec, hospital emergency rooms are overflowing more than ever. The occupancy rate? It can even exceed 200%.
Average waiting time? More than five hours in the waiting room and more than 16 hours on a stretcher. When it’s not even longer.
However, major decision-makers know well in advance that in winter, influenza hits hard. Not to mention the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and since 2020, COVID-19.
Welcome to Quebec
Doctors also report conditions worthy of bush medicine. In extreme cold, more and more homeless people also seek refuge in already overwhelmed emergency rooms.
When the persistent crisis of the health network and the growing crisis of homelessness, itself produced in large part by the stubborn housing crisis, meet, this is the result. Welcome to Quebec.
In short, in emergencies, it’s the perfect storm again. A perfect storm yet perfectly predictable. And that’s where the problem lies.
Is there a pilot from the Ministry of Health on this plane or a top gun anyone at the head of the new Santé Québec agency? When will there be a real sense of urgency to rectify our hospital emergencies, which we have been lamenting, like good fatalists, for a long time?
Exhausted staff
Isn’t Santé Québec supposed to see to the “operationalization” of the network on the ground? Isn’t the ministry supposed to dictate its “orientations”?
However, from “crisis cells” in petrified silence during and after the holiday season – the predictable season of respiratory viruses – medical staff are allowed to become exhausted.
Patients, including very vulnerable people, are left roped up in the inhospitable corridors of the emergency room. No, we are not in an episode of STAT. Find the error…
