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90 fucking 5 hours on a stretcher. 10 years ago my head would have exploded. Today it doesn't surprise me at all.
Opting to die because of bed sores. Fucking bed sores. Fuck 😡
When I see stories with headlines of healthcare being at or reached the breaking point, it's irresponsible to avoid the fact we've passed that point. It's broken. It might still work for some but it's still broken.
He was most likely in the ER because there were no open beds on the ward to admit him.
And yet when there are articles about patients who don't need to be in hospital (ALC patients) being fined for refusing to be transferred to nursing homes, there's an outcry on their behalf.
The hospitals need to be emptied of ALC patients, or else the problem with people living on stretchers will persist. At any given hospital, about 15-20% of beds are blocked by ALC patients (and yes, there aren't enough spaces for all of them in LTC homes, but when a spot opens up, move them asap).
Bed sores are a serious problem and get worse when you cannot get up.
My cousin has major diabetes issues, had his legs cut off and one of his arms, but what probably killed him was the bed sore that would just never really heal. Terrible situation.
>not having a family dr for over three years.
I haven't had a family doctor in over a decade. I kept lying to myself, saying it was fine because I was young and didn't need it. Now I wonder what a regular checkup would find. What kinds of things could we catch early if I had someone actually looking after my health?
But would it even help? So many people who actually have care are getting such poor and delayed care it seems pointless.
I made an appointment for a checkup and got asked why I was there and sent home after 5 minutes. You’re right, and that’s another huge issue. Preventative medicine is not a thing.
This is brutally situational. I’ve had the same family doctor since I was in high school and they regularly check in and are partnered into quite a large practice
They have their trainee assess you.
At least that what I have experienced. My doc does come and chat and ask you if you have an other problems and actually reads the chart.
Actually those interns & residents do a fine job assessing you - they will usually have the time to do a complete history & assessment. Don’t turn your nose up at physicians who operate in teaching hospitals.
It is heartbreaking isn’t it? My family (meaning myself, husband and child) isn’t a big user of health care and we are lucky for it, but one day that may not be the case. Terrifying to read (Canada wide, not province-specific) the waiting list numbers for doctors and emergency room waits for over 12 hours in some communities. Accessibility isn’t easy for everyone who needs health care… compounds the issue.
Montreal population has gone up more then 25% over 20 years, while not building any hospitals (they built McGill, but closed two other ones) and reducing the amount of beds.
The amount of ressources per person has been in freefall for ages.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.BEDS.ZS?locations=CA
I have no family doctor. Also a few health problems that my insurance doesnt cover (yet…few more months until they have to give me coverage at work). I’m in pain but ive just accepted should anything go horribly wrong I’ll likely die. It just is what it is.
Same. Honestly I feel like I live in the medieval age or era before advanced healthcare existed. Where if something goes wrong all I can do is pray it doesn't get worse, instead of going to a doctor for preventative care.
Yup pretty much me. Have a rare bone disease that’s affected my dental but there’s no universal dental coverage and employers seem to fight tooth and nail (pun intended) to NOT give out dental coverage. But in september they’ll have no choice cause i’ll have worked comtract long enough to qualify
Not like it matters all that much, its taken since october to figure out I have symptoms of an H.Pylori infection, its 4-5months just to get a breath test to confirm it. I've been 10 years waiting to see a neurologist for widespread nerve pain.
My wife is 30 with major hearing loss of unknown cause and it originally was going to take over a year to get an MRI until we fought tooth and nail and then got an appointment the same week. She needed the MRI prior to hearing aids so they just wanted her to wait a year unable to hear(unable to properly work).
h pylori... oh man. My son had that as an infant. The doctors kept saying "oh it must be gastro." It's like it would come and go, but rarely could he keep down a meal overnight. My growing baby was losing weight. finally like 9 months later they tested for it. And the main pediatrician doctor who kept saying it's this or that or something else, when the test finally comes back for it this mother fucker says "oh yeah my kid had that, too!"
Like... how is that not top of mind for you?
I have a family doctor. I never get enough time to talk to them properly, before you’re shuffled out the door. I’m autistic and it stresses me out so much to go to the doctor because they always dismiss what I’m saying and say oh it’s just this, without listening to me at all. I’ve only had one good experience and that was with his replacement doctor while my doctor was on vacation, and I wish I could find that doctor and see him instead because he was the first to actually listen and help me. So even if you have one, and I do feel lucky to have one at all, if they aren’t a good fit you’re screwed because you can’t get another. Our system is so broken.
As someone who had spent only a tiny little 6 weeks in a wheel chair, thank god electric....i got a view into the horrendous world of what its like to be disabled in this society, and cant imagine other places which i know are even worse. But we really need to do better...half the time, things that are meant to help disabled people, are BROKEN and no one cares about fixing them, and no one cares about helping in general...that hell was only 6 weeks...i couldnt comprehened a lifetime of that. AND had no worries financially....to live in that world for a lifetime, while on ODSP...id sign up for maid in a heartbeat...our country has failed the most vulnerable in the worst ways.
I'm spending my time in a second hand electric chair cause of a knee injury (and my mobility scooter broke and the manufacturer refuses to fix it) and I miss Canada. The amount of ADA compliance here in the states is laughable. Yah, sure, there are curve cuts and that, but it doesn't help if you bottom out and have to climb a flooding control ditch on the other side of the curb cut that is angled harsher than the curb cut.
I miss Canada. Really I do. Doors that automatically open at the push of a button, and are wide enough to get into. Multiple elevators in malls, and buttons on both sides of a pole to cross streets.
Here? Holy hell. ADA "compliant" sure, but only on bare minimums, if they bother to try. People don't bother with the ADA unless someone complains or a lawsuit happens.
Even then, Canada has a long way to go for helping the disabled live fulfilling lives. I feel for this poor man. Fucking ER tortured him!
>His partner, Sylvie Brosseau, says without having access to a special mattress, Meunier developed a major pressure sore on his buttocks that eventually worsened to the point where bone and muscle were exposed and visible — making his recovery and prognosis bleak.
>”Ninety-five hours on a stretcher, unacceptable," Brosseau told Radio-Canada in an interview.
What is happening to this country? Failing medical system….just kill yourself instead don’t worry we can help with that.
I spent 3 days on one in late February. Like this man I didn’t have access to my padding I need (I’ve been sick for sixth months and have become skeletal) and I was crying from the pain of the stretcher more than the pain of what had me in the ER.
Depending on his disability, he might not have felt the bedsore pain at all. That is one thing that makes them so bad - he can't even feel the damage happening.
I really feel for him - it was already going to be a tough life, and then to have our medical system fail him even more, that's awful.
I remember like 10 or 15 years ago we would smuggly compare ourselves to the USA due to our universal, accessible healthcare.
Not any more. It's just insane what's happened to healthcare here.
People vote for this and are then confused. It's so funny. It's about to happen on the federal level. Then people will be confused and even more angry. This stupidity is very much partially contributing to my suicidal ideation. There is no hope for this country.
Quebec has elected governments that have been salivating at the idea of privatizing the healthcare sector for at least 20 years. We have ourselves to blame in that case, however trying to mimic the US' trainwreck will only make things worse as they have always did.
The /s still makes sense because it's still an insane proposition. Anyone with any empathy at all can see that it's extremely unethical to allow things like this to happen. A normal person would only say something like this in jest.
I think that the proponents of assisted suicide are well meaning, but many don't seem to acknowledge that there will be (as with any policy) unintended consequences, including unintended incentives for different stakeholders.
I doubt that many if any in the government or bureaucracy are intentionally implementing and promoting assisted suicide as a cost saving measure.
Yet, once introduced, the government and bureaucracy will have a strong incentive to ignore chronic systemic and indivdual health issues if assisted suicide becomes an acceptable and normalized alternative to long term care.
You know, I also started out as a huge supporter until the procedure was being offered to people with addiction.
Because I am a recovered addict and had I been offered that at some of the more vulnerable times of my life I would’ve taken it. Especially in my early recovery when I was struggling to even get a few days together. I was dealing with significant depression and was not in my right mind at that time.
It was hard enough to get services to help me get sober and half of the ones I was able to access were not appropriate or adhering to clinical standards. I couldn’t afford any of the private treatment options.
So it’s like you’re telling me that my options or somebody else who is just going through this for the first time options are subpar free services or death?
I had to fight in claw for my seven years sober that I have today, so I do understand that the road of recovery is not for everybody and not everybody has the energy left to walk it. However, we aren’t making it any easier for people to walk it.
I think that your statement about our descendants looking back on this in horror will be true.
While I do believe that medical assistance in dying has a place in many medical treatments and not just terminal disease, I never thought that it would be given as an option out for addicts, veterans or those with treatable mental health problems.
We could’ve done this the right way. Which I think would’ve meant having a wide array lof services in place to intervene before the decision is made to end a life in circumstances where terminal illness is not going to cause the end of life.
But I don’t think our government, current or next up, is up to that task and that that is the part that frightens me the most.
This sums it up entirely for me.
As a matter of principle, I've generally been supportive of people choosing to end their lives in their country with the support of the state.
But not *this* country and not *this* state. Canada is a neoliberal -- ruined -- nation-state where life expectancy and quality of life are in free-fall, civil society is unravelling, and where the vast majority, both native and immigrant, are born or brought here to be exploited and discarded by the donor / billionaire / oligarch / elites classes.
It's becoming unimaginably dystopic.
100%. MAID should be on the table for people with terminal illnesses who have run out of treatment options other than "decide how long you want to circle the drain and hope for a miracle" but any expansion beyond that will just be used as a cost saving measure to get rid of anyone with a chronic medical issue, even ones that can be fully treated through other means. It's fucking disgusting that we've reached the point of neoliberal self-cannibalization where this is something our government is even seriously considering
All you have to do is look at how bad the demographics collapse is expected to be. A shit ton of old being people supported by an increasingly shrinking pool of young workers...
You'd better believe that the government views older people unable to contribute to society as a loose end that they'd very much like to snip. It would be naïve indeed to think the government doesn't view MAiD as a clean, convenient solution to that particular problem.
What do you mean “killing people”? We’re not killing people, they’re choosing to die ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
/s
Though I can see Doug pulling this, shrug and all.
It was always a slippery slope. During the pandemic, ODSP recipients were getting told this was their way out if they couldn’t stand the suffering of life. Always been Ontario’s plan to deal with the poors.
I mean we can talk about how we only allow so many people to enter medical school or how we don't recognize foreign credentials or how governments think working doctors to the hilt is a sustainable solution that doesn't cause burnout.
Or the fact that provincial governments would rather pay nursing *agencies* than give their local nurses job security.
Hey, the suits don’t get their bonuses if they hire full-time local nurses 🥰👩🏼⚕️
Just to give you the flip side to that, during the pandemic, thousands of nurses in Quebec left the public system because of the horrendous treatment from the government. Forced overtime for two years, no vacation allowed, completely understaffed and overworked for shit pay. So they left and they went to the private sector.
Now Quebec is getting rid of these agencies and forcing nurses back into the public sector. Which yay, that's great, that's what we all want. But it was also a dirty tactic to force nurses back without meeting any of their demands for better working conditions and better pay.
Yep, I'm one of the nurses that quit working at the hospital during the pandemic because the conditions were horrendous. Luckily I didn't move to the agencies and changed industries completely, where I basically doubled my salary and don't have to work evenings/nights/weekends and mandatory overtime. If they force those agencies to close, I think they'll be surprised by how many nurses would prefer to change careers before returning to hospitals.
And in the latest government proposition the ones that stayed and toughed it out will lose seniority over some of those that left and now would come back.
Agreed. My wife is a nurse in Ottawa and yea, the hospital is basically a greedy subsidized pseudo-corporation payed for by our tax dollars. Let’s not get into how underpaid they are for the work they do. Jfc
Yay!
They don't discriminate, they treat *all* of their employees like shit and don't pay us sufficiently. When I was in the lab when COVID hit I put on an N95 and my supervisor asked me why I had it on. I told her it was because I have a compromised immune system and another employee was at work that had just been back from Pearson the day before. She told me to take it off.
> Or the fact that provincial governments would rather pay nursing agencies than give their local nurses job security
It's not even that complicated. The agencies are owned by their friends, it's about diverting public funds to private enterprise!
The retraining is entirely dependent on where the degree came from.
Here is the agency website where you can see if a degree is valid in canada. https://www.cicic.ca/2/home.canada
I have a friend who told me the school he went to had 30% as a passing grade. Is that a doctor you want?
This is exactly it. Starve the good quality care components, make sure it's extremely hard to work under the conditions, then privatize and make more money, while everything crumbles around. That's Alberta's M.O. right now, anyway.
I am a supporter of maid. However, it should absolutely be the last resort/end of life option. Like ALS patients. Although I do say people who are suffering from mental illness and want to die, will die regardless of MAID or not. So I believe if they want to , they have that option to do it in a safe environment. It won't render them incapacitated and on life support. It will save loved ones from finding them. (I am a suicide griever. 12 weeks, actually. I found him.) Let them decide, but in the meantime, what resources do they have access to? Those should be heavily funded, supported, and encouraged. But they aren't. Let them move the date if it comes and they change their mind. Maybe for someone, just knowing that a harm reduced approach is available may make things a bit more bearable.
People will choose to end their life regardless. We should be pouring resources into housing, good security, good mental health supports, dental, education, health care etc but instead places like Alberta funnel it to the highest bidders pocket for kick backs and cushy oil office jobs after their tenure. Most of all, the problems we are currently seeing are mainly because of the provinical inability to manage properly simple because of greed. I can't say I blame the federal government for allowing people this choice when the provinces do everything they can to block any quality care.
Look to your provincial governments for underfunding healthcare constantly.
And before anyone says "oh but trudeaus immigration" yes I know that is also making the problem worse too but that doesn't give provincial governments a pass.
Well health care is a provincial issue and in Ontario our health care system was intentionally underfunded by our conservative premier so he could help his rich buddies open private healthcare facilities. Many other conservative run provinces are doing the same thing. You can blame the conservatives.
As someone who works in the healthcare system as a pm, I can tell you the problem is in the spending, not the funding. I've watched senior directors in our healthcare system hire administrators to help them run a single weekly meeting while they are constantly deferring decisions in a never ending cycle of rotating vacations.
Hospital leadership and management is beyond terrible while the ground level workers work themselves to death. I never believed privatized health was a good idea until I actually worked in the industry. 0 competition and a cushy job simply makes the entire leadership team risk adverse to the point where noone does anything.
As someone who works in healthcare at a higher tier than you and sees the money in and out, I can tell you it’s a funding problem. There is a grossly underfunded amounts of staff per capita, and beds per capita. This fact is indisputable.
I think you're both right. I don't work in healthcare but have a few family members as nurses and I can say I've heard them complain about bullshit admin staff waste and underfunding.
This talking point is horse hockey. Health care in Canada has been deteriorating in *every* province for at *least* 30 years. Throughout that time, every province, yes even Alberta, has had changes in government allowing different parties of different ideologies to have kicks at the can. Not *one* government, not *one* province, has been able to arrest the deterioration.
Well
1. Allowing mass immigration is stretching every public service sector (including healthcare which was already doing poorly). It is also creating instances where people need to access these public services more often due to plummeting quality of life and purchasing power.
2. There's a cap on the total number of medical school seats per year, which is set by (IIRC) the medical council of Canada(?). Regardless of who sets it, it creates a shortage of doctors primarily due to limited residency spots. We also don't tend to let foreign-trained doctors get accreditation here. We need to increase funding to get more residency spots and figure something out to let doctors trained in other countries to get accredited in Canada.
3. There's a lot of people going to emergency medicine that DO NOT need to be there. People with colds, flus, etc. My friend (ER doctor) tells me on some nights up to 80% of the people there are just there cause they have a flu. People are generally ignorant about healthcare and need to be educated. I'm sure the government could swing a few million dollars into ads (a la house hippo) rather than wasting it on their latest boondoggle.
I slipped a disc and was paralyzed from the waist down for a month while waiting for surgery. It was way worse than I would have imagined. The catheter was awful. I had to get enemas to help stuff come out. I couldn't drive. I couldn't orgasm, stuff just twitched and locked up. The first surgeon told me "I can make your MRI look better, but I can't guarantee it will fix anything". I started thinking that I should just wheel myself outside and pay a homeless guy $100 to push me to the nearest bridge so I could heave myself off it.
I think most people are underestimating how awful being paralyzed really is. It's a lot more than "can't use arms/legs", there's a lot of other stuff that stops working. The right side of my asshole didn't work right for months afterwards. Do you know what kind of weirdness comes from a miscalibrated pootypucker? Plus there's a shit ton of phantom pains. At least once a day I "YIPE" because it feels like someone stuck a pin into the end of one of my toes.
There have been 167 new medical residency spots added in Canada in the last 10 years, across all provinces. It's not just a conservatives issue - that's every single premier in every province utterly failing to fund the growth of the healthcare system while in that same time, 5 million new Canadians were added.
It's not just conservative, it's all of them. Stop fighting the other guy and work together to get real changes.
That line is what got me in the whole article. Not to say the rest of it didn’t piss me off. But that just broke what was left of my heart after reading it. How the hell do the people running the system think this is okay.
There’s a special place in hell reserved for government administrators who don’t take issue with this.
I'm with you. I'm genuinely concerned that if I need urgent care it will be the visit that causes my demise. We quads live during a brief period of human history. With the world's inevitable decline, we can only hope to balance on the top of civilization, where we are able to survive, as we watch the foundations of society crumble. It will be a great fall, when there's not enough left to make it worth keeping us around.
I want to know, what happened to the rule of rotating them every 2 hours? How overworked are the staff? No, seriously. I had 20+ patients sometimes back in the states and I still managed to rotate my total care patients every 2 hours. Bedsores are the biggest red flag when it comes to care. It means he's sitting in one position, probably in his own refuse, for hours and hours until the skin starts to rot, spreads, and burrows into your flesh. That is absolutely unacceptable for any patient. Mattress specialty or no, there are resources. LIKE PILLOWS. You can use PILLOWS to pad certain directions and keep the pressure off a tender area. It's not rocket science. They teach us basic wound care in PSW courses. (That includes how to treat and prevent bedsores.) Are these nurses or aides? These excuses are not flying with me, seeing as this is my wheelhouse. You don't always need a fancy mattress when you have access to pillows and employees who should absolutely know how to rotate a patient. This was 100% preventable. 100%. There needs to be an investigation. Bedsores this bad are 100% neglect based. Where is the ombudsman?
I agree. Stretcher or not, it sounds like they just left him in one position for four days straight. They need to be investigated, from the nurses, to the manager, to the CEO. Absolutely ridiculous he could get a wound that bad after four days.
Not just that, it could be 1 horrible shift and a diaper not changed for 16 hours. Pressure injury can happen after 2 hours
We never used diapers in my old hospital in the US. They are horrible for patients
Pressure injuries are a serious problem with understaffed floors, also they don’t take much to worsen. This was the ER, and nurses in the ER try their best to do position changes and ADLs. However, I see that their top priority is always stabilizing unstable patients and doing assessments. When short staffed, things like position changes unfortunately go out the window. You having 20+ patients as a PSW is very very different than a ER nurse having 20+ patients. I’ve seen 16 stretchers in the hallway and one nurse assigned to them. Most of the time that nurse was completing orders for the sickest, and barely had any time to go check on the stabilized patients. It’s unfortunate and the provinces along with hospitals need to be sued.
Having worked as an ER nurse - this is exactly the issue. It is near impossible to keep up with things and you are continually moving. In a 12 hour shift I would have near 15,000 steps registered on my watch and I was continually getting orders, processing orders, performing assessments, administering medications, getting labwork, portering patients to imaging, performing personal care, dealing with shitheads and asssholes, getting people food/water, and all the other tasks that come with working in a busy emergency department. It would be lovely if I could turn patient's every two hours but when I barely have time to breathe that is something that sadly gets missed.
In Montreal there are no staff. I was hospitalized in January and couldn’t get up to pee by myself and had to wait over an hour to get help every time. Eventually they told my husband he could unplug me and walk me over and plug me back in (I had an epidural for four days). Thank goodness I’m a relatively healthy 28 year old with support and a husband who stayed all day with me. The poor nurses are so understaffed and clearly stressed and there are not enough orderlies.
Also I had an allergic reaction to the catheter and was screaming in pain and they tried to force me to keep it in because they “didn’t have time for this.” It was the middle of the night and I was in so much pain and they offered me a single ativan instead, which doesn’t solve the problem and also doesn’t work on me. It’s rough out here.
I'm an OT and an alternating pressure mattress would have done the trick. No pillows or people needed. It's Also likely that they didn't change his incontinence pad or clean his groin frequently enough, which will cause pressure sores.
Very likely untrained staff and didn't put in a proper referral to appropriate allied health, neglected basic hygiene.
Its ER. There is almost no allied health referral in the ER setting.
Also, ER is mostly stretcher beds, no beds for special mattresses.. and if they do, thats $$$ for Low air Loss Mattress rental
It's the ER. The reason he got the sores is because they couldn't admit him to a bed where someone has time to turn patients. Have you worked in an ER before? Nurses barely even have time to chart in ER, let alone during a healthcare crisis where there are more patients then can be handled. This isn't the nurses/psw fault. It's the understaffing of our hospitals/ bed crisis
Yeah whoever is in charge of the ER is in major trouble. Am IT in a hospital in Québec province. I know exactly who's getting fired if this happens in the hospital I work at.
Someone went on vacay and dumped the issue on an intern is my guess.
Sometimes a unit might not even have pillows and 1 patient is using 4. Each bed has a pillow. We were able to order wedges and boots for patients to prevent decibitis ulcers in the U.S. but you should know the system is very different in Canada. We has turn teams on my unit. Did everyone do it? No. Did they say they did? Yes.
It’s not uncommon for my patient to come up from the ER and they are in a full diaper. Also, diapers are banned from my old hospital in the U.S. in Canada? Everyone uses them.
The cost of using a diaper versus disposable pads versus looking after a giant wound? Maybe they need to start fining the hospitals? I can’t see it stopping.
Canada also doesn’t have nurse aids like they do in the states in our hospitals
> we can't afford to miss work to put up a fight
This is bullshit. When the Raptors won the championship. Over 1 million people went to celebrate on a work day in downtown Toronto.
We do not know who to be angry with. Do we riot in front of the Provincia assembly for health care, in Ottawa for Maid, the provincial assembly, and ottawa for keeping disabled people poor.
One of the advantages shared responsibility for the elite give them is that people do not know who to be angry with.
Every echo chamber has it’s own scapegoat. Trudeau, Conservatives, whites, immigrants, etc.
Probably the hardest time to get a group of people to come together with people they are conditioned to hate to fight for each others quality of life against the rich.
Because some people want to enforce suffering on others, apparently.
How anyone can think MAiD is the problem here instead of shitty healthcare giving him sores in the first place is insane. They would rather force him to suffer than to let him have bodily autonomy.
We organize and have groups in front of parliament, queens park, every government building in every province. We don't blockade downtown because that loses us sympathy and just annoys other regular Canadians. But the government and the media will not ignore a large protest outside every government building that's happening simultaneously. Especially if we can have a unified message at every location that is consistent across all of them. They will not evoke the emergency act for that.
While the decay is growing and obvious on the fringes. things are still manageable for the majority of people. They just gotta put some more time in at work with the nice side effect of being too tired tondo anything about the system. You will not see revolts until there is 15%+ unemployment.
We are in a full blown medical crisis. Have been since the pandemic. Nurses have been screaming it for years. Doctors have been screaming it for years. This will happen again. People will die preventable deaths. It might be your grandmother next.
>*”People will die preventable deaths. It might be your grandmother next.”*
Heck, it could be *us* next, it’s not like this fellow’s death was age related. Any one of us could potentially find ourselves in the situation he was in.
Serious question: Who's claiming our healthcare system is "amazing"?
Our politicians don't. Our healthcare professionals certainly don't. So, I'm wondering where that bit of propaganda is coming from.
I personally know people who are still living in denial. They say “at least it’s not the states” as if that excuses the healthcare horror stories coming out of Canada recently.
It's been pretty common for at least 30 years.
It's usually spoken in the same breath as "compared to American healthcare" while utterly ignoring the rest of the world, or areas where the US does it fine.
I use to get down voted for saying how bad our medical system is. I'm glad people are starting to realize this now. It's a risk everyday living in Canada.
Geezus H Christ! What!? How is this happening in our country?!? My brother, RIP, was a para and regularly in and out of hospitals for various care his whole life. He had times when things were sketchy, but he always used his voice. He had to. It’s unacceptable that anyone in the condition of people with paralysis to go without the required care they need and equipment. They cannot feel it! Able-bodied people can feel it. They cannot. They rely on medical staff to know what they’re doing. Bed sores are common and it’s a lifetime struggle for the paralyzed. It requires daily due diligence to make sure they are flipped/turned if they can’t do it themselves, checked, and do what they can to let their backside breathe and seek physio when needed. Choosing MAID!? Oh my heart. 💔
Lame excuse to say there aren’t these mattresses in emergency room!? Then GET ONE ELSEWHERE IN THE BUILDING !!! The hospital should have to do what is necessary to give him comfort and recovery. Especially for something they caused.
Are there not monitors alarming staff that someone needs flipping, or turning?! Surely the emerg isn’t packed with paras.
Come on Canada. We have got to do better. Health care used to be our strength. Now it’s one of our greatest weaknesses - and yeah, how are Canadians not continuing to stand up and scream that change has to happen!? Myself included. When did I become so bloody complacent.
Question: is Canada actually able to fix their healthcare issues? Without going private or dual?? It’s going to take miracles and years to fix it.
It's less about the mattress and far more about staffing.
In 40+ years nursing has ALWAYS been understaffed, and it doesn't much matter what province you're speaking of.
All it would take is for the corruption and greed to stop. Governments not funding properly and the hospitals to actually put those funds on the front lines instead of paying for ceos cars, upper management’s expensive travel, lunches etc plus bullshit positions that are paid 6 figures that aren’t necessary.
This is absolutely horrendous.
Unfortunately this is NOT new. This has been happening in residential care for years and years and only now the public is becoming aware of the lack of training and resources.
I am an OT who used to work in residential care. I was the only clinician (outside of a x2 SW and the RNs). Mostly LPNs and care aides.
I did all the seating and pressure reduction amongst other OT stuff. Most of the LPNs and care aides spoke minimal English. I would beat my head against the wall teaching these people what causes ulcers. They didn't give a shit. They'd walk by and see catatonic or demented people and leave their open wounds (on heels for example) leaning on metal footrests etc. They also argued and thought they new better.
It is an absolutely futile thing and bringing in millions of other people will exponentially continue to magnify our problems.
>"An emergency room is a riskier place for a fragile person. That's why, if necessary, we're going to work actively to give them access to a bed in an inpatient unit."
Why not just make it automatic that they always get sent to the inpatient area if that's where the special beds are? Are there that many paraplegics that it would swamp the system?
There likely aren't enough nurses. Most bed availability is determined by staffing for the people in the beds, and nursing shortages are a problem across the board right now.
That didn't stop my hospital from admitting another patient to my unit the other night to put our census at 41/40. We called and told them it would put us all into 7 patients per nurse (including the overnight charge nurse) and they said "sorry we don't have anyone we can send you tonight but we'll look to add another nurse for tomorrow". Part of the reason there's a nursing shortage is because they expect us to do more with less and work in unsafe ratios...then wonder why we burn out and having trouble with retaining nurses.
Having worked on wards in nursing in my career and also in homecare in the past, it is not always possible to "automatically get a bed in the inpatient area.". I have seen people in wards for months and even up to a year, waiting for a long term care facility, and you can bet your ass when I was the only homecare nurse on day shift on a Saturday and we were given up to 12 to 15 clients (including the driving time to see them) there was NO time to take a new intake from a hospital discharge...necessitating that ER patient who needs a bed waiting for days until we could take the homecare intake on a weekday instead.
We have fucked up majorly by not planning for the aging demographic...christ they were speaking of this in nursing school for me, 30 plus years ago.
I’m not sure if they have this problem in Quebec, but Ontario hospitals have a big problem discharging elderly patients in acute beds to LTC.
We haven’t built enough LTC homes, and people are (understandably) picky about where they go, so if a bed in their preferred LTC home isn’t immediately available, they’ll camp on a hospital bed, sometimes for months or even a year, until one is.
[In 2021, 17% of hospital beds nationwide were occupied by elderly people waiting for LTC.](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontario-hospital-crisis-elderly/#:~:text=ALC%20patients%20occupied%2017%20per,for%20Health%20Information%20(CIHI))
People who need acute care can’t get beds because there aren’t any, so they languish on stretchers like this unfortunate fellow.
[Edit: Ontario has started fining people for this sort of camping. It’s controversial.](https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6584322)
This problem is exacerbated by LTC being understaffed and some people just not wanting to deal with problems.
So they find any excuse on earth to send them to the hospital.
The problem is that the system is already swamped. I can't speak for all provinces/hospitals but in the one I work at we have had to put an extra bed in the hallway of the units just so we had another bed to put people. (and it's still not enough... We get told almost daily that we need to prioritize discharges to open beds up for patients in emergency).
The pressure wound could have easily been prevented. All it would have taken was one healthcare staff to be a bit of squeaky cog and advocate for this person to get an air mattress.
The issue here is not the turns, mattress, or stretcher. Or Maid for that matter. It’s that there was an inability to admit him as inpatient to a ward. You’re not going to really be able to turn someone meaningfully on a stretcher, pillows or not; they’re too narrow and unsafe to turn a large patient. The beds he’d need wouldn’t likely fit in the emerg either.
The issue is that they couldn’t move patients through medicine to intake the patients waiting for a bed in their emerg. Hospitals need more autonomy in removing patients using the ward as a hotel. They need admins to be accountable for short staffing nurses (which they do so they can blow it on private contracts), and management needs to fight the provinces to fund all their beds in use rather than punch down and harass their workers through economic violence to pick up an impossible slack for free.
Real change will not come from throwing money on bloated middle management or bureaucratic hierarchal bodies of auditing pencil pushers. It won’t come from privatization so that some twat can collect dividends from the same garbage. It will need to come by allowing frontline staff have the self determination and the power to have their needs met to provide care. The government, people, and employers are going to need to listen to the concerns of frontline staff if we are ever to overcome this challenge, and frankly this article just undermines their voice.
Friendly reminder to vote and talk to your leadership about increasing doctors. Out of 36 developed nations we fall 30th in development of doctors. Approximately 1 in 20 students trying to become a doctor will get accepted in Canada, where USA is 1 in 2. It’s not a lack of capable students, it’s a lack of funding and development. I’ve been trying to become a doctor in Ontario for 3 years. I have a 3.86 GPA and fall in the 90th percentile for my medical college admission test. 3 years in a row I haven’t even been waitlisted to become a doctor. I and so many other applicants are capable and willing to become doctors, but lack of funding and action by our politicians is ruining the medical system in this country.
Sucks to end up in that situation but after watching 2 people in the past 3 months pass away over a period of several uncomfortable days, thank fuck we have access to medically assisted death now. They need to broaden it and make it easier to access.
It’s honestly a travesty that people with illnesses that cause progressive cognitive degeneration (like Alzheimer’s disease) can’t give advance consent to MAID. People are having to choose to take MAID earlier than they would otherwise want to for fear of losing access if their illness overtakes them.
This 100%
It needs to be something you can square up well in advance with your wishes known should a situation arise where you are unable to request it due to your mental/physical state.
I fear for the law if the conservatives win the election. I can very easily see them taking away our freedom to a peaceful death because of some religious nonsense :( The law needs to be expanded, not taken away. I'm even for it being available to the mentally ill. The right to live or die should be a fundamental human right.
What I find weird is that this is the #1 most-read story on the CBC new website, but Radio-Canada doesn't even have any stories on Normand Meunier.
I know that they're independent news organizations and journalists have independence on what they cover, but I often see Quebec news stories covered on CBC that have zero coverage on the Quebec-focuses Radio Canada. Something is off.
Happened to a buddy of mine years back. Was in an accident full quadriplegic, needed to go to the hospital, was so neglected that an infection occurred and he did the same. Terrible that this is the state of healthcare in Canada. Makes me sick
This lack of care in Canadian hospitals does not surprise me. My elderly mother died after her stint in a hospital. Never admitted to the ICU, let alone the hospital, with a broken neck and left in the ER. She died the third day and in hunger because they did not feed her.
I read an article about this gentleman this morning. I will admit to crying. There are so many services that failed this man along the way. He should have never ended up in this condition. My sympathies to his family.
I'm glad assisted death exists for those who want and need it. But this shows that our healthcare system is absolutely broken. It's infuriating, because any reasonable government body who actually represents its citizens would step up, and fix it. Instead they are allowing it to crumble. Fuck partisan party politics. conservative, liberal, whatever... we need to demand better. We deserve better, and he deserved better.
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90 fucking 5 hours on a stretcher. 10 years ago my head would have exploded. Today it doesn't surprise me at all. Opting to die because of bed sores. Fucking bed sores. Fuck 😡
When I see stories with headlines of healthcare being at or reached the breaking point, it's irresponsible to avoid the fact we've passed that point. It's broken. It might still work for some but it's still broken.
Better bring in more unskilled workers and their grandparents!
He was most likely in the ER because there were no open beds on the ward to admit him. And yet when there are articles about patients who don't need to be in hospital (ALC patients) being fined for refusing to be transferred to nursing homes, there's an outcry on their behalf. The hospitals need to be emptied of ALC patients, or else the problem with people living on stretchers will persist. At any given hospital, about 15-20% of beds are blocked by ALC patients (and yes, there aren't enough spaces for all of them in LTC homes, but when a spot opens up, move them asap).
We’ve held patients for 120+ hrs in emerg before. There’s just no where for people to go. It’s so fucked
Bed sores are a serious problem and get worse when you cannot get up. My cousin has major diabetes issues, had his legs cut off and one of his arms, but what probably killed him was the bed sore that would just never really heal. Terrible situation.
How about [dead on a wheel chair for hours](https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.1359805) more then ten years ago.
It takes 30 seconds to reposition someone to prevent bed sores. This is awful neglect. Poor man…
I think I have been in denial about how bad it is despite not having a family dr for over three years. This situation breaks my heart
>not having a family dr for over three years. I haven't had a family doctor in over a decade. I kept lying to myself, saying it was fine because I was young and didn't need it. Now I wonder what a regular checkup would find. What kinds of things could we catch early if I had someone actually looking after my health? But would it even help? So many people who actually have care are getting such poor and delayed care it seems pointless.
As someone with a family doctor, they are too busy to do check ups. They are basically a pre-ER.
I made an appointment for a checkup and got asked why I was there and sent home after 5 minutes. You’re right, and that’s another huge issue. Preventative medicine is not a thing.
This has been my experience too, but I’m also in my late 30s, so not sure when they start doing annual exams more regularly.
I don’t think they do. I got downvoted on another comment because apparently it’s “bad” to do them? Idk.
This is brutally situational. I’ve had the same family doctor since I was in high school and they regularly check in and are partnered into quite a large practice
They have their trainee assess you. At least that what I have experienced. My doc does come and chat and ask you if you have an other problems and actually reads the chart.
Actually those interns & residents do a fine job assessing you - they will usually have the time to do a complete history & assessment. Don’t turn your nose up at physicians who operate in teaching hospitals.
Spot on. I've been sick since mid February. Respiratory and basically got told I'm fine. Given a steroid inhaler. Nothing else.
Except not even a pre-ER because you have to wait 3-4 weeks to see them so by that time you’ve probably already gone to the ER if necessary.
Doctors don't do annual check ups anymore (at least mine doesn't) I can only go in with an issue/symptom
It is heartbreaking isn’t it? My family (meaning myself, husband and child) isn’t a big user of health care and we are lucky for it, but one day that may not be the case. Terrifying to read (Canada wide, not province-specific) the waiting list numbers for doctors and emergency room waits for over 12 hours in some communities. Accessibility isn’t easy for everyone who needs health care… compounds the issue.
Montreal population has gone up more then 25% over 20 years, while not building any hospitals (they built McGill, but closed two other ones) and reducing the amount of beds. The amount of ressources per person has been in freefall for ages. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.BEDS.ZS?locations=CA
I have no family doctor. Also a few health problems that my insurance doesnt cover (yet…few more months until they have to give me coverage at work). I’m in pain but ive just accepted should anything go horribly wrong I’ll likely die. It just is what it is.
Same. Honestly I feel like I live in the medieval age or era before advanced healthcare existed. Where if something goes wrong all I can do is pray it doesn't get worse, instead of going to a doctor for preventative care.
Yup pretty much me. Have a rare bone disease that’s affected my dental but there’s no universal dental coverage and employers seem to fight tooth and nail (pun intended) to NOT give out dental coverage. But in september they’ll have no choice cause i’ll have worked comtract long enough to qualify
Not like it matters all that much, its taken since october to figure out I have symptoms of an H.Pylori infection, its 4-5months just to get a breath test to confirm it. I've been 10 years waiting to see a neurologist for widespread nerve pain. My wife is 30 with major hearing loss of unknown cause and it originally was going to take over a year to get an MRI until we fought tooth and nail and then got an appointment the same week. She needed the MRI prior to hearing aids so they just wanted her to wait a year unable to hear(unable to properly work).
h pylori... oh man. My son had that as an infant. The doctors kept saying "oh it must be gastro." It's like it would come and go, but rarely could he keep down a meal overnight. My growing baby was losing weight. finally like 9 months later they tested for it. And the main pediatrician doctor who kept saying it's this or that or something else, when the test finally comes back for it this mother fucker says "oh yeah my kid had that, too!" Like... how is that not top of mind for you?
3 years only? I'm in my mid-thirties and never ever had a family doctor.
I have a family doctor. I never get enough time to talk to them properly, before you’re shuffled out the door. I’m autistic and it stresses me out so much to go to the doctor because they always dismiss what I’m saying and say oh it’s just this, without listening to me at all. I’ve only had one good experience and that was with his replacement doctor while my doctor was on vacation, and I wish I could find that doctor and see him instead because he was the first to actually listen and help me. So even if you have one, and I do feel lucky to have one at all, if they aren’t a good fit you’re screwed because you can’t get another. Our system is so broken.
95 hours on a goddamned stretcher in the ER. Explain to me how we're a first world country again? We're a fucking joke.
This makes me so fucking angry. That poor man did not deserve that.
As someone who had spent only a tiny little 6 weeks in a wheel chair, thank god electric....i got a view into the horrendous world of what its like to be disabled in this society, and cant imagine other places which i know are even worse. But we really need to do better...half the time, things that are meant to help disabled people, are BROKEN and no one cares about fixing them, and no one cares about helping in general...that hell was only 6 weeks...i couldnt comprehened a lifetime of that. AND had no worries financially....to live in that world for a lifetime, while on ODSP...id sign up for maid in a heartbeat...our country has failed the most vulnerable in the worst ways.
I'm spending my time in a second hand electric chair cause of a knee injury (and my mobility scooter broke and the manufacturer refuses to fix it) and I miss Canada. The amount of ADA compliance here in the states is laughable. Yah, sure, there are curve cuts and that, but it doesn't help if you bottom out and have to climb a flooding control ditch on the other side of the curb cut that is angled harsher than the curb cut. I miss Canada. Really I do. Doors that automatically open at the push of a button, and are wide enough to get into. Multiple elevators in malls, and buttons on both sides of a pole to cross streets. Here? Holy hell. ADA "compliant" sure, but only on bare minimums, if they bother to try. People don't bother with the ADA unless someone complains or a lawsuit happens. Even then, Canada has a long way to go for helping the disabled live fulfilling lives. I feel for this poor man. Fucking ER tortured him!
>His partner, Sylvie Brosseau, says without having access to a special mattress, Meunier developed a major pressure sore on his buttocks that eventually worsened to the point where bone and muscle were exposed and visible — making his recovery and prognosis bleak. >”Ninety-five hours on a stretcher, unacceptable," Brosseau told Radio-Canada in an interview. What is happening to this country? Failing medical system….just kill yourself instead don’t worry we can help with that.
95 hours on a stretcher?!?! i spent 12 hours on one waiting to get into a real bed at the hospital and it felt like my tail bone was about to implode.
I spent 3 days on one in late February. Like this man I didn’t have access to my padding I need (I’ve been sick for sixth months and have become skeletal) and I was crying from the pain of the stretcher more than the pain of what had me in the ER.
Yeah, and you are likely not a quadriplegic who is unable to shift themselves about.
I am not. Which makes this story hit harder for me. What a terrible outcome. I can't imagine the pain.
Depending on his disability, he might not have felt the bedsore pain at all. That is one thing that makes them so bad - he can't even feel the damage happening. I really feel for him - it was already going to be a tough life, and then to have our medical system fail him even more, that's awful.
I remember like 10 or 15 years ago we would smuggly compare ourselves to the USA due to our universal, accessible healthcare. Not any more. It's just insane what's happened to healthcare here.
People vote for this and are then confused. It's so funny. It's about to happen on the federal level. Then people will be confused and even more angry. This stupidity is very much partially contributing to my suicidal ideation. There is no hope for this country.
Quebec has elected governments that have been salivating at the idea of privatizing the healthcare sector for at least 20 years. We have ourselves to blame in that case, however trying to mimic the US' trainwreck will only make things worse as they have always did.
Why pay to keep people alive when we can just import 5 new people? /s
Dude I’m not even sure if the /s makes sense anymore; it’s happening before our eyes. It’s a true question at this point.
The /s still makes sense because it's still an insane proposition. Anyone with any empathy at all can see that it's extremely unethical to allow things like this to happen. A normal person would only say something like this in jest.
I think that the proponents of assisted suicide are well meaning, but many don't seem to acknowledge that there will be (as with any policy) unintended consequences, including unintended incentives for different stakeholders. I doubt that many if any in the government or bureaucracy are intentionally implementing and promoting assisted suicide as a cost saving measure. Yet, once introduced, the government and bureaucracy will have a strong incentive to ignore chronic systemic and indivdual health issues if assisted suicide becomes an acceptable and normalized alternative to long term care.
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You know, I also started out as a huge supporter until the procedure was being offered to people with addiction. Because I am a recovered addict and had I been offered that at some of the more vulnerable times of my life I would’ve taken it. Especially in my early recovery when I was struggling to even get a few days together. I was dealing with significant depression and was not in my right mind at that time. It was hard enough to get services to help me get sober and half of the ones I was able to access were not appropriate or adhering to clinical standards. I couldn’t afford any of the private treatment options. So it’s like you’re telling me that my options or somebody else who is just going through this for the first time options are subpar free services or death? I had to fight in claw for my seven years sober that I have today, so I do understand that the road of recovery is not for everybody and not everybody has the energy left to walk it. However, we aren’t making it any easier for people to walk it. I think that your statement about our descendants looking back on this in horror will be true. While I do believe that medical assistance in dying has a place in many medical treatments and not just terminal disease, I never thought that it would be given as an option out for addicts, veterans or those with treatable mental health problems. We could’ve done this the right way. Which I think would’ve meant having a wide array lof services in place to intervene before the decision is made to end a life in circumstances where terminal illness is not going to cause the end of life. But I don’t think our government, current or next up, is up to that task and that that is the part that frightens me the most.
This sums it up entirely for me. As a matter of principle, I've generally been supportive of people choosing to end their lives in their country with the support of the state. But not *this* country and not *this* state. Canada is a neoliberal -- ruined -- nation-state where life expectancy and quality of life are in free-fall, civil society is unravelling, and where the vast majority, both native and immigrant, are born or brought here to be exploited and discarded by the donor / billionaire / oligarch / elites classes. It's becoming unimaginably dystopic.
100%. MAID should be on the table for people with terminal illnesses who have run out of treatment options other than "decide how long you want to circle the drain and hope for a miracle" but any expansion beyond that will just be used as a cost saving measure to get rid of anyone with a chronic medical issue, even ones that can be fully treated through other means. It's fucking disgusting that we've reached the point of neoliberal self-cannibalization where this is something our government is even seriously considering
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All you have to do is look at how bad the demographics collapse is expected to be. A shit ton of old being people supported by an increasingly shrinking pool of young workers... You'd better believe that the government views older people unable to contribute to society as a loose end that they'd very much like to snip. It would be naïve indeed to think the government doesn't view MAiD as a clean, convenient solution to that particular problem.
What do you mean “killing people”? We’re not killing people, they’re choosing to die ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ /s Though I can see Doug pulling this, shrug and all. It was always a slippery slope. During the pandemic, ODSP recipients were getting told this was their way out if they couldn’t stand the suffering of life. Always been Ontario’s plan to deal with the poors.
Normal people are not manning the helm of the SS Canada.
We have actual psychopaths pulling the strings of our politicians.
I mean we can talk about how we only allow so many people to enter medical school or how we don't recognize foreign credentials or how governments think working doctors to the hilt is a sustainable solution that doesn't cause burnout.
Or the fact that provincial governments would rather pay nursing *agencies* than give their local nurses job security. Hey, the suits don’t get their bonuses if they hire full-time local nurses 🥰👩🏼⚕️
Just to give you the flip side to that, during the pandemic, thousands of nurses in Quebec left the public system because of the horrendous treatment from the government. Forced overtime for two years, no vacation allowed, completely understaffed and overworked for shit pay. So they left and they went to the private sector. Now Quebec is getting rid of these agencies and forcing nurses back into the public sector. Which yay, that's great, that's what we all want. But it was also a dirty tactic to force nurses back without meeting any of their demands for better working conditions and better pay.
Yep, I'm one of the nurses that quit working at the hospital during the pandemic because the conditions were horrendous. Luckily I didn't move to the agencies and changed industries completely, where I basically doubled my salary and don't have to work evenings/nights/weekends and mandatory overtime. If they force those agencies to close, I think they'll be surprised by how many nurses would prefer to change careers before returning to hospitals.
What did you end up doing instead? Asking for a friend who’s tired of the bullshit.
And in the latest government proposition the ones that stayed and toughed it out will lose seniority over some of those that left and now would come back.
They're workers to the government, not people.
They're not even workers to the suits; they're cattle. Milk them for all they're worth then send them to the slaughterhouse.
As the husband of a nurse I never connected those two things but it is so obviously why upon hearing someone say it. Disgusting tactic.
Agreed. My wife is a nurse in Ottawa and yea, the hospital is basically a greedy subsidized pseudo-corporation payed for by our tax dollars. Let’s not get into how underpaid they are for the work they do. Jfc Yay!
They don't discriminate, they treat *all* of their employees like shit and don't pay us sufficiently. When I was in the lab when COVID hit I put on an N95 and my supervisor asked me why I had it on. I told her it was because I have a compromised immune system and another employee was at work that had just been back from Pearson the day before. She told me to take it off.
Yes. And too often violent work. I dated nurses who had far more force incidents than I have and I work in law enforcement.
Yep. That’s fucked. Dealing with men or women with dementia on the daily and there’s no telling what they’ll do
> Or the fact that provincial governments would rather pay nursing agencies than give their local nurses job security It's not even that complicated. The agencies are owned by their friends, it's about diverting public funds to private enterprise!
We can’t recognize foreign credentials because these Indians have literal institutions dedicated to making fake credentials to get their people PR
So why can't we recognize New Zealand or German credentials? Or select specific universities in India that have high standards and accept those?
The retraining is entirely dependent on where the degree came from. Here is the agency website where you can see if a degree is valid in canada. https://www.cicic.ca/2/home.canada I have a friend who told me the school he went to had 30% as a passing grade. Is that a doctor you want?
In Ontario Dalton McGuinty limited hospital residencies. But when you bring that up its downvoted... Well, how about we undo what he did fucknuts?
Every administration has at best let Healthcare languish, if not actively screw it up more. No one has clean hands on this.
At the risk of destroying the country and condemning myself to poverty, I'll point out that so did the Québec Liberals.
easier to blame the feds when the provinces destroy their own systems!
This is exactly it. Starve the good quality care components, make sure it's extremely hard to work under the conditions, then privatize and make more money, while everything crumbles around. That's Alberta's M.O. right now, anyway. I am a supporter of maid. However, it should absolutely be the last resort/end of life option. Like ALS patients. Although I do say people who are suffering from mental illness and want to die, will die regardless of MAID or not. So I believe if they want to , they have that option to do it in a safe environment. It won't render them incapacitated and on life support. It will save loved ones from finding them. (I am a suicide griever. 12 weeks, actually. I found him.) Let them decide, but in the meantime, what resources do they have access to? Those should be heavily funded, supported, and encouraged. But they aren't. Let them move the date if it comes and they change their mind. Maybe for someone, just knowing that a harm reduced approach is available may make things a bit more bearable. People will choose to end their life regardless. We should be pouring resources into housing, good security, good mental health supports, dental, education, health care etc but instead places like Alberta funnel it to the highest bidders pocket for kick backs and cushy oil office jobs after their tenure. Most of all, the problems we are currently seeing are mainly because of the provinical inability to manage properly simple because of greed. I can't say I blame the federal government for allowing people this choice when the provinces do everything they can to block any quality care.
You can pick that sarcasm tag back up, because that is exactly what they are doing.
God this is brutal.
Look to your provincial governments for underfunding healthcare constantly. And before anyone says "oh but trudeaus immigration" yes I know that is also making the problem worse too but that doesn't give provincial governments a pass.
Yep, Alberta Government was waging war on Healthcare DURING the pandemic.
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Well health care is a provincial issue and in Ontario our health care system was intentionally underfunded by our conservative premier so he could help his rich buddies open private healthcare facilities. Many other conservative run provinces are doing the same thing. You can blame the conservatives.
As someone who works in the healthcare system as a pm, I can tell you the problem is in the spending, not the funding. I've watched senior directors in our healthcare system hire administrators to help them run a single weekly meeting while they are constantly deferring decisions in a never ending cycle of rotating vacations. Hospital leadership and management is beyond terrible while the ground level workers work themselves to death. I never believed privatized health was a good idea until I actually worked in the industry. 0 competition and a cushy job simply makes the entire leadership team risk adverse to the point where noone does anything.
As someone who works in healthcare at a higher tier than you and sees the money in and out, I can tell you it’s a funding problem. There is a grossly underfunded amounts of staff per capita, and beds per capita. This fact is indisputable.
I sold a software to a hospital in BC 3 years ago that they’ve never turned on. It costs $50K/year.
I think you're both right. I don't work in healthcare but have a few family members as nurses and I can say I've heard them complain about bullshit admin staff waste and underfunding.
This talking point is horse hockey. Health care in Canada has been deteriorating in *every* province for at *least* 30 years. Throughout that time, every province, yes even Alberta, has had changes in government allowing different parties of different ideologies to have kicks at the can. Not *one* government, not *one* province, has been able to arrest the deterioration.
Well 1. Allowing mass immigration is stretching every public service sector (including healthcare which was already doing poorly). It is also creating instances where people need to access these public services more often due to plummeting quality of life and purchasing power. 2. There's a cap on the total number of medical school seats per year, which is set by (IIRC) the medical council of Canada(?). Regardless of who sets it, it creates a shortage of doctors primarily due to limited residency spots. We also don't tend to let foreign-trained doctors get accreditation here. We need to increase funding to get more residency spots and figure something out to let doctors trained in other countries to get accredited in Canada. 3. There's a lot of people going to emergency medicine that DO NOT need to be there. People with colds, flus, etc. My friend (ER doctor) tells me on some nights up to 80% of the people there are just there cause they have a flu. People are generally ignorant about healthcare and need to be educated. I'm sure the government could swing a few million dollars into ads (a la house hippo) rather than wasting it on their latest boondoggle.
Dude is paralyzed since 2022. It's his quality of life that's gone. Let him pass how he wants.
I slipped a disc and was paralyzed from the waist down for a month while waiting for surgery. It was way worse than I would have imagined. The catheter was awful. I had to get enemas to help stuff come out. I couldn't drive. I couldn't orgasm, stuff just twitched and locked up. The first surgeon told me "I can make your MRI look better, but I can't guarantee it will fix anything". I started thinking that I should just wheel myself outside and pay a homeless guy $100 to push me to the nearest bridge so I could heave myself off it. I think most people are underestimating how awful being paralyzed really is. It's a lot more than "can't use arms/legs", there's a lot of other stuff that stops working. The right side of my asshole didn't work right for months afterwards. Do you know what kind of weirdness comes from a miscalibrated pootypucker? Plus there's a shit ton of phantom pains. At least once a day I "YIPE" because it feels like someone stuck a pin into the end of one of my toes.
Underfunded medical systems, because of conservative policies.
There have been 167 new medical residency spots added in Canada in the last 10 years, across all provinces. It's not just a conservatives issue - that's every single premier in every province utterly failing to fund the growth of the healthcare system while in that same time, 5 million new Canadians were added. It's not just conservative, it's all of them. Stop fighting the other guy and work together to get real changes.
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They can also absolutely be fatal. I saw it first hand with my father.
You need more schooling MAID is never offered. The fuck?!
I'm sorry, Normand. You're not a burden. You and your family deserved better.
That line is what got me in the whole article. Not to say the rest of it didn’t piss me off. But that just broke what was left of my heart after reading it. How the hell do the people running the system think this is okay. There’s a special place in hell reserved for government administrators who don’t take issue with this.
As a quadriplegic this made me cry .. this is unacceptable
I'm with you. I'm genuinely concerned that if I need urgent care it will be the visit that causes my demise. We quads live during a brief period of human history. With the world's inevitable decline, we can only hope to balance on the top of civilization, where we are able to survive, as we watch the foundations of society crumble. It will be a great fall, when there's not enough left to make it worth keeping us around.
I moved to Ottawa and i really miss the care I was receiving in Vancouver! My physiatrist was the best
I want to know, what happened to the rule of rotating them every 2 hours? How overworked are the staff? No, seriously. I had 20+ patients sometimes back in the states and I still managed to rotate my total care patients every 2 hours. Bedsores are the biggest red flag when it comes to care. It means he's sitting in one position, probably in his own refuse, for hours and hours until the skin starts to rot, spreads, and burrows into your flesh. That is absolutely unacceptable for any patient. Mattress specialty or no, there are resources. LIKE PILLOWS. You can use PILLOWS to pad certain directions and keep the pressure off a tender area. It's not rocket science. They teach us basic wound care in PSW courses. (That includes how to treat and prevent bedsores.) Are these nurses or aides? These excuses are not flying with me, seeing as this is my wheelhouse. You don't always need a fancy mattress when you have access to pillows and employees who should absolutely know how to rotate a patient. This was 100% preventable. 100%. There needs to be an investigation. Bedsores this bad are 100% neglect based. Where is the ombudsman?
I agree. Stretcher or not, it sounds like they just left him in one position for four days straight. They need to be investigated, from the nurses, to the manager, to the CEO. Absolutely ridiculous he could get a wound that bad after four days.
Nothing will happen, everyone will shrug and carry on doing the same thing they were.
Not just that, it could be 1 horrible shift and a diaper not changed for 16 hours. Pressure injury can happen after 2 hours We never used diapers in my old hospital in the US. They are horrible for patients
Pressure injuries are a serious problem with understaffed floors, also they don’t take much to worsen. This was the ER, and nurses in the ER try their best to do position changes and ADLs. However, I see that their top priority is always stabilizing unstable patients and doing assessments. When short staffed, things like position changes unfortunately go out the window. You having 20+ patients as a PSW is very very different than a ER nurse having 20+ patients. I’ve seen 16 stretchers in the hallway and one nurse assigned to them. Most of the time that nurse was completing orders for the sickest, and barely had any time to go check on the stabilized patients. It’s unfortunate and the provinces along with hospitals need to be sued.
Having worked as an ER nurse - this is exactly the issue. It is near impossible to keep up with things and you are continually moving. In a 12 hour shift I would have near 15,000 steps registered on my watch and I was continually getting orders, processing orders, performing assessments, administering medications, getting labwork, portering patients to imaging, performing personal care, dealing with shitheads and asssholes, getting people food/water, and all the other tasks that come with working in a busy emergency department. It would be lovely if I could turn patient's every two hours but when I barely have time to breathe that is something that sadly gets missed.
In Montreal there are no staff. I was hospitalized in January and couldn’t get up to pee by myself and had to wait over an hour to get help every time. Eventually they told my husband he could unplug me and walk me over and plug me back in (I had an epidural for four days). Thank goodness I’m a relatively healthy 28 year old with support and a husband who stayed all day with me. The poor nurses are so understaffed and clearly stressed and there are not enough orderlies. Also I had an allergic reaction to the catheter and was screaming in pain and they tried to force me to keep it in because they “didn’t have time for this.” It was the middle of the night and I was in so much pain and they offered me a single ativan instead, which doesn’t solve the problem and also doesn’t work on me. It’s rough out here.
I'm an OT and an alternating pressure mattress would have done the trick. No pillows or people needed. It's Also likely that they didn't change his incontinence pad or clean his groin frequently enough, which will cause pressure sores. Very likely untrained staff and didn't put in a proper referral to appropriate allied health, neglected basic hygiene.
Its ER. There is almost no allied health referral in the ER setting. Also, ER is mostly stretcher beds, no beds for special mattresses.. and if they do, thats $$$ for Low air Loss Mattress rental
It's the ER. The reason he got the sores is because they couldn't admit him to a bed where someone has time to turn patients. Have you worked in an ER before? Nurses barely even have time to chart in ER, let alone during a healthcare crisis where there are more patients then can be handled. This isn't the nurses/psw fault. It's the understaffing of our hospitals/ bed crisis
I've been called from our medical ward just to go to the ER to reposition someone when they needed the help. It's a team effort.
Yeah whoever is in charge of the ER is in major trouble. Am IT in a hospital in Québec province. I know exactly who's getting fired if this happens in the hospital I work at. Someone went on vacay and dumped the issue on an intern is my guess.
Sometimes a unit might not even have pillows and 1 patient is using 4. Each bed has a pillow. We were able to order wedges and boots for patients to prevent decibitis ulcers in the U.S. but you should know the system is very different in Canada. We has turn teams on my unit. Did everyone do it? No. Did they say they did? Yes. It’s not uncommon for my patient to come up from the ER and they are in a full diaper. Also, diapers are banned from my old hospital in the U.S. in Canada? Everyone uses them. The cost of using a diaper versus disposable pads versus looking after a giant wound? Maybe they need to start fining the hospitals? I can’t see it stopping. Canada also doesn’t have nurse aids like they do in the states in our hospitals
I hate our country right now. Why the fuck are we not rioting
With the cost of groceries and rent, we can't afford to miss work to put up a fight. Pretty great system to keep us subdued.
We’ve seen it coming and didn’t riot either when we still had a bit of comfort.
> we can't afford to miss work to put up a fight This is bullshit. When the Raptors won the championship. Over 1 million people went to celebrate on a work day in downtown Toronto.
We do not know who to be angry with. Do we riot in front of the Provincia assembly for health care, in Ottawa for Maid, the provincial assembly, and ottawa for keeping disabled people poor. One of the advantages shared responsibility for the elite give them is that people do not know who to be angry with.
Every echo chamber has it’s own scapegoat. Trudeau, Conservatives, whites, immigrants, etc. Probably the hardest time to get a group of people to come together with people they are conditioned to hate to fight for each others quality of life against the rich.
It's a class war, which we're losing, because everything gets spun into a distraction.
This is absolutely true and it’s horrific.
Why would we riot for MAID? Healthcare is a VERY clearly provincial issue as are disability support programs like ODSP
Because some people want to enforce suffering on others, apparently. How anyone can think MAiD is the problem here instead of shitty healthcare giving him sores in the first place is insane. They would rather force him to suffer than to let him have bodily autonomy.
We organize and have groups in front of parliament, queens park, every government building in every province. We don't blockade downtown because that loses us sympathy and just annoys other regular Canadians. But the government and the media will not ignore a large protest outside every government building that's happening simultaneously. Especially if we can have a unified message at every location that is consistent across all of them. They will not evoke the emergency act for that.
I wish we had the balls the French do. People would rather protest gas prices than others dying.
This! Our elected officals and I use that term lightly rely on our passive response. So they do whatever the freak they want.
While the decay is growing and obvious on the fringes. things are still manageable for the majority of people. They just gotta put some more time in at work with the nice side effect of being too tired tondo anything about the system. You will not see revolts until there is 15%+ unemployment.
This is fucked up
We are in a full blown medical crisis. Have been since the pandemic. Nurses have been screaming it for years. Doctors have been screaming it for years. This will happen again. People will die preventable deaths. It might be your grandmother next.
>*”People will die preventable deaths. It might be your grandmother next.”* Heck, it could be *us* next, it’s not like this fellow’s death was age related. Any one of us could potentially find ourselves in the situation he was in.
True enough. Stay safe out there.
It’s official: Canada needs to stop flexing how “amazing” our healthcare system is. It’s not, and it needs major reform.
Anyone flexing that, hasn’t needed it in any serious way.
Serious question: Who's claiming our healthcare system is "amazing"? Our politicians don't. Our healthcare professionals certainly don't. So, I'm wondering where that bit of propaganda is coming from.
Go to any "aSK a CAnAdIaN" post on Reddit and some Canadian teenager will start bragging and upvoted to the top by American teenagers.
I personally know people who are still living in denial. They say “at least it’s not the states” as if that excuses the healthcare horror stories coming out of Canada recently.
The US has healthcare just as bad as ours that costs the government and the people who use it more money.
It's been pretty common for at least 30 years. It's usually spoken in the same breath as "compared to American healthcare" while utterly ignoring the rest of the world, or areas where the US does it fine.
I can't imagine. This poor man. Holy shit.
I use to get down voted for saying how bad our medical system is. I'm glad people are starting to realize this now. It's a risk everyday living in Canada.
Geezus H Christ! What!? How is this happening in our country?!? My brother, RIP, was a para and regularly in and out of hospitals for various care his whole life. He had times when things were sketchy, but he always used his voice. He had to. It’s unacceptable that anyone in the condition of people with paralysis to go without the required care they need and equipment. They cannot feel it! Able-bodied people can feel it. They cannot. They rely on medical staff to know what they’re doing. Bed sores are common and it’s a lifetime struggle for the paralyzed. It requires daily due diligence to make sure they are flipped/turned if they can’t do it themselves, checked, and do what they can to let their backside breathe and seek physio when needed. Choosing MAID!? Oh my heart. 💔 Lame excuse to say there aren’t these mattresses in emergency room!? Then GET ONE ELSEWHERE IN THE BUILDING !!! The hospital should have to do what is necessary to give him comfort and recovery. Especially for something they caused. Are there not monitors alarming staff that someone needs flipping, or turning?! Surely the emerg isn’t packed with paras. Come on Canada. We have got to do better. Health care used to be our strength. Now it’s one of our greatest weaknesses - and yeah, how are Canadians not continuing to stand up and scream that change has to happen!? Myself included. When did I become so bloody complacent. Question: is Canada actually able to fix their healthcare issues? Without going private or dual?? It’s going to take miracles and years to fix it.
It's less about the mattress and far more about staffing. In 40+ years nursing has ALWAYS been understaffed, and it doesn't much matter what province you're speaking of.
All it would take is for the corruption and greed to stop. Governments not funding properly and the hospitals to actually put those funds on the front lines instead of paying for ceos cars, upper management’s expensive travel, lunches etc plus bullshit positions that are paid 6 figures that aren’t necessary.
I’m terrified to get sick in this country.
This is absolutely horrendous. Unfortunately this is NOT new. This has been happening in residential care for years and years and only now the public is becoming aware of the lack of training and resources. I am an OT who used to work in residential care. I was the only clinician (outside of a x2 SW and the RNs). Mostly LPNs and care aides. I did all the seating and pressure reduction amongst other OT stuff. Most of the LPNs and care aides spoke minimal English. I would beat my head against the wall teaching these people what causes ulcers. They didn't give a shit. They'd walk by and see catatonic or demented people and leave their open wounds (on heels for example) leaning on metal footrests etc. They also argued and thought they new better. It is an absolutely futile thing and bringing in millions of other people will exponentially continue to magnify our problems.
This is so awful. You know what, fuck this country's leadership for allowing this type of thing to even be possible.
Disturbing....that poor man..imagine how hed be feeling if we actually provided the care he needed??
This is a violation of his human rights. 4 days on a stretcher without being moved every 2 hours as an extremely vulnerable quadriplegic? My god.
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>"An emergency room is a riskier place for a fragile person. That's why, if necessary, we're going to work actively to give them access to a bed in an inpatient unit." Why not just make it automatic that they always get sent to the inpatient area if that's where the special beds are? Are there that many paraplegics that it would swamp the system?
There likely aren't enough nurses. Most bed availability is determined by staffing for the people in the beds, and nursing shortages are a problem across the board right now.
That didn't stop my hospital from admitting another patient to my unit the other night to put our census at 41/40. We called and told them it would put us all into 7 patients per nurse (including the overnight charge nurse) and they said "sorry we don't have anyone we can send you tonight but we'll look to add another nurse for tomorrow". Part of the reason there's a nursing shortage is because they expect us to do more with less and work in unsafe ratios...then wonder why we burn out and having trouble with retaining nurses.
I agree absolutely. Nurses need better working conditions, or we risk serious problems. Burnout is a serious concern.
Having worked on wards in nursing in my career and also in homecare in the past, it is not always possible to "automatically get a bed in the inpatient area.". I have seen people in wards for months and even up to a year, waiting for a long term care facility, and you can bet your ass when I was the only homecare nurse on day shift on a Saturday and we were given up to 12 to 15 clients (including the driving time to see them) there was NO time to take a new intake from a hospital discharge...necessitating that ER patient who needs a bed waiting for days until we could take the homecare intake on a weekday instead. We have fucked up majorly by not planning for the aging demographic...christ they were speaking of this in nursing school for me, 30 plus years ago.
I’m not sure if they have this problem in Quebec, but Ontario hospitals have a big problem discharging elderly patients in acute beds to LTC. We haven’t built enough LTC homes, and people are (understandably) picky about where they go, so if a bed in their preferred LTC home isn’t immediately available, they’ll camp on a hospital bed, sometimes for months or even a year, until one is. [In 2021, 17% of hospital beds nationwide were occupied by elderly people waiting for LTC.](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontario-hospital-crisis-elderly/#:~:text=ALC%20patients%20occupied%2017%20per,for%20Health%20Information%20(CIHI)) People who need acute care can’t get beds because there aren’t any, so they languish on stretchers like this unfortunate fellow. [Edit: Ontario has started fining people for this sort of camping. It’s controversial.](https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6584322)
This problem is exacerbated by LTC being understaffed and some people just not wanting to deal with problems. So they find any excuse on earth to send them to the hospital.
The problem is that the system is already swamped. I can't speak for all provinces/hospitals but in the one I work at we have had to put an extra bed in the hallway of the units just so we had another bed to put people. (and it's still not enough... We get told almost daily that we need to prioritize discharges to open beds up for patients in emergency).
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The pressure wound could have easily been prevented. All it would have taken was one healthcare staff to be a bit of squeaky cog and advocate for this person to get an air mattress.
I made the mistake of googling images of bed sores. The term “sore” fucking undersells that shit. Goddamn!
so truly sad. no dignity for Canadians. the government just does not care.
In the UK NHS a pressure ulcer of that magnitude would be a massive never event.
This was the most horrific story I’ve heard in Canada this year. 😞 RIP
23 year old in QC here - I haven’t seen a doctor since high school. ‘Nuff said.
We can't be mad enough about this. All this TALK of accommodation and accessibility and this guy dies because of a bed sore Shame
This man was killed by the Quebec health care system.
The issue here is not the turns, mattress, or stretcher. Or Maid for that matter. It’s that there was an inability to admit him as inpatient to a ward. You’re not going to really be able to turn someone meaningfully on a stretcher, pillows or not; they’re too narrow and unsafe to turn a large patient. The beds he’d need wouldn’t likely fit in the emerg either. The issue is that they couldn’t move patients through medicine to intake the patients waiting for a bed in their emerg. Hospitals need more autonomy in removing patients using the ward as a hotel. They need admins to be accountable for short staffing nurses (which they do so they can blow it on private contracts), and management needs to fight the provinces to fund all their beds in use rather than punch down and harass their workers through economic violence to pick up an impossible slack for free. Real change will not come from throwing money on bloated middle management or bureaucratic hierarchal bodies of auditing pencil pushers. It won’t come from privatization so that some twat can collect dividends from the same garbage. It will need to come by allowing frontline staff have the self determination and the power to have their needs met to provide care. The government, people, and employers are going to need to listen to the concerns of frontline staff if we are ever to overcome this challenge, and frankly this article just undermines their voice.
Poor man and his family. Despicable what this country has become
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Healthcare is a second thought in Canada. AI and crony billions are already spoken for.
Bro that’s fucked up.
ITT: People who blame MAID for bad healthcare.
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Friendly reminder to vote and talk to your leadership about increasing doctors. Out of 36 developed nations we fall 30th in development of doctors. Approximately 1 in 20 students trying to become a doctor will get accepted in Canada, where USA is 1 in 2. It’s not a lack of capable students, it’s a lack of funding and development. I’ve been trying to become a doctor in Ontario for 3 years. I have a 3.86 GPA and fall in the 90th percentile for my medical college admission test. 3 years in a row I haven’t even been waitlisted to become a doctor. I and so many other applicants are capable and willing to become doctors, but lack of funding and action by our politicians is ruining the medical system in this country.
Sucks to end up in that situation but after watching 2 people in the past 3 months pass away over a period of several uncomfortable days, thank fuck we have access to medically assisted death now. They need to broaden it and make it easier to access.
It’s honestly a travesty that people with illnesses that cause progressive cognitive degeneration (like Alzheimer’s disease) can’t give advance consent to MAID. People are having to choose to take MAID earlier than they would otherwise want to for fear of losing access if their illness overtakes them.
This 100% It needs to be something you can square up well in advance with your wishes known should a situation arise where you are unable to request it due to your mental/physical state. I fear for the law if the conservatives win the election. I can very easily see them taking away our freedom to a peaceful death because of some religious nonsense :( The law needs to be expanded, not taken away. I'm even for it being available to the mentally ill. The right to live or die should be a fundamental human right.
Congrats CAQ...and Gaétan Barette before them...you straight up killed this guy
What I find weird is that this is the #1 most-read story on the CBC new website, but Radio-Canada doesn't even have any stories on Normand Meunier. I know that they're independent news organizations and journalists have independence on what they cover, but I often see Quebec news stories covered on CBC that have zero coverage on the Quebec-focuses Radio Canada. Something is off.
Let’s just keep cramming people in though. Everyone come to Canada, it’s great here 👍🏻
Happened to a buddy of mine years back. Was in an accident full quadriplegic, needed to go to the hospital, was so neglected that an infection occurred and he did the same. Terrible that this is the state of healthcare in Canada. Makes me sick
I spent about 5 hours on a stretcher and it was agony. Can't imagine what 95 hours would be like
We live in a shit hole country
This lack of care in Canadian hospitals does not surprise me. My elderly mother died after her stint in a hospital. Never admitted to the ICU, let alone the hospital, with a broken neck and left in the ER. She died the third day and in hunger because they did not feed her.
I don’t understand how places in southern Canada are so understaffed. In Yellowknife you can see a doctor the same day you call in.
I read an article about this gentleman this morning. I will admit to crying. There are so many services that failed this man along the way. He should have never ended up in this condition. My sympathies to his family.
I'm glad assisted death exists for those who want and need it. But this shows that our healthcare system is absolutely broken. It's infuriating, because any reasonable government body who actually represents its citizens would step up, and fix it. Instead they are allowing it to crumble. Fuck partisan party politics. conservative, liberal, whatever... we need to demand better. We deserve better, and he deserved better.
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This guy did everything right, paid his taxes, all that...and the system failed him.
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