Supervisor appointed in Brampton Civic Hospital

Ken White, former CEO at Trillium Health Centre in Mississauga, will at least spend the next six to nine months, coming up with an action plan to improve communication between the hospital and the community, ensure proper staffing and reduce wait times in the emergency ward.

Amid reports that a patient had the wrong leg operated on at Brampton Civic, Ontario's first public-private hospital, Health Minister George Smitherman has named the supervisor who will look into problems at the new facility.

"People in the community should expect more answers to the questions raised ... What we see here is evidence of the need to do better," Smitherman told a press conference at the Brampton site of the William Osler Health Centre yesterday.

Smitherman took the rare step of appointing a supervisor to restore public confidence in Brampton Civic after the deaths of Harnek Sidhu, 52, of pancreatitis and Amarjit Narwal, 42, of a stroke, sparked a huge community protest in early December.

Then, on Christmas Day, 72-year-old Amar Kaur Brar complained doctors cut open her right leg by mistake when she went to hospital for surgery on her fractured left leg.

Although he had been an investigator at Brampton Civic for about a year, helping it to ramp up to its opening on October 28th, White said he was "not at all familiar" with concerns raised by the community about a shortage of staff, unduly long waits in emergency and a lack of beds.

"It's very sad there's all kinds of these misadventures in health care happening across Canada," White told reporters in an interview after the press conference.

Smitherman blamed "mischief makers" and alluded to persistent negative media reports about problems at the hospital since it opened as being a factor in attracting staff to work at the centre.

Some of those reports have been "pretty far off the mark," he said.

Brampton Civic, which replaced Peel Memorial Hospital, "overnight gained 100 beds, which is unheard of in health care" today, said Smitherman.
However, he did acknowledge staffing challenges.

Source: The Star

This is a video from CBC News concerning the appointment of Ken White

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Quebecer complians about "English treatment" in hospital

The reaction of many people to being kept waiting for 20 hours in a hospital emergency ward in Quebec might be to worry, or complain, about what seems like a chronic shortage of medical personnel.

Sitting for hours on a hard chair in a room with other injured or ill people, watching for the faintest hint that the one overworked doctor might see you now, could lead a sensible person to think that whatever Quebec is doing to find more health care workers, it isn't enough.

Jean Dorion, the head of the Société St. Jean Baptiste de Montréal, takes a different approach. His reaction to waiting nearly a day for care was to call for French to be made the working language in all Quebec hospitals, including the few remaining bilingual hospitals.

Why? Because when he was finally seen by a doctor, the doctor asked if he spoke English.
Dorion said he replied that he did speak English. "I was treated in English," he said. "I found it humiliating."
He further suggested that if he had asked for treatment in French the doctor might not have looked at his case "with a very favourable prejudice."

This is ridiculous, to say nothing of offensive. Dorion has the nerve to suggest that a medical practitioner would take less care with his health if he asked to be treated in one of Canada's two official languages.

Dorion provides nothing in the line of proof for this odious suggestion. So pressed is he for ammunition for his make-everything-French cause that he has to go back seven years to unearth a study by the Office Québécois de la langue française.

This dusty study shows, Dorion said, that 18 percent of francophone patients treated in bilingual hospitals said they had been "in contact" with medical workers or other personnel who lacked a "sufficient" knowledge of French. Is he kidding? What does "in contact" mean? Who defines "sufficient"?

More recently, according to information compiled by the Office québécois de la langue française, it received a grand total of five complaints on the subject of language use in hospitals. Four of the complaints concerned language on signs; only one had to do with language of service. Exactly one complaint in the course of a year. In a normal world, that would be considered a triumph. It is a triumph.

Some hospitals in Quebec are allowed to be bilingual but must make French service available - and by the evidence, they do just that. This requirement does not mean that every single person working in a bilingual hospital has to be perfectly bilingual. Dorion, for instance, doesn't even know if the doctor who asked if he spoke English was bilingual. It appears that Dorion preferred getting a chance to complain to the simple expedient of asserting his right to be helped in French. What nonsense.

If any group is having trouble communicating in hospitals, it is rural anglophones. The regions are becoming more unilingually French even as unilingual anglophones grow older and require more medical care. Now there is a real problem.

Source: The Gazette

Editor's opinion:

"How does that work, open heart surgery in French? Or getting a French flu shot? Complaining about something like that, after having waited for 20 hours? To magnify a futility like that can only come from a French speaking nitpicker. Humiliated? What's so humiliating about the English language? How many people, on a world-scale, actually speak French and why is that do you think? Of course there are many nice francophone people, but in general as a people, is there anyone that likes the French? I know in Europe nobody really does. They don't even like each other, hence the cold relationship between the French from France and the ones from Quebec!"

Wait time for surgery hits all time high of over 18 weeks

A typical Canadian seeking surgical or other therapeutic treatment had to wait 18.3 weeks in 2007, an all-time high, according to new research published today by independent research organization The Fraser Institute.

“Despite government promises and the billions of dollars funneled into the Canadian health care system, the average patient waited more than 18 weeks in 2007 between seeing their family doctor and receiving the surgery or treatment they required,” said Nadeem Esmail, Director of Health System Performance Studies at The Fraser Institute and co-author of the 17th annual edition of Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada.

The survey measures median waiting times to document the extent to which queues for visits to specialists and for diagnostic and surgical procedures are used to control health care expenditures.

“It’s becoming clearer that Canada’s current health care system can not meet the needs of Canadians in a timely and efficient manner, unless you consider access to a waiting list timely and efficient,” Esmail added.

The 2007 survey found the total median waiting time for patients between referral from a general practitioner and treatment, averaged across all 12 specialties and 10 provinces surveyed, increased to 18.3 weeks from 17.8 weeks observed in 2006. This is primarily due to an increase in the first wait, between seeing the general practitioner and attending a consultation with a specialist.

Total wait times increased in six provinces: Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. This masked the decreased wait times in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

Total Waiting Time

Ontario recorded the shortest waiting time overall (the wait between visiting a general practitioner and receiving treatment), at 15 weeks, followed by British Columbia (19 weeks) and Quebec (19.4 weeks). Saskatchewan (27.2 weeks), New Brunswick (25.2 weeks) and Nova Scotia (24.8 weeks) recorded the longest waits in Canada.

Read the rest of the numbers here

Source: The Fraser Institute

Editor's opinion:

"If this isn't a cry for more efficiency, accountability and openness of hospital managements.........

It wouldn't hurt to have more people form "real" business life management in hospitals.

Wouldn't you like to know where all our billions of dollars end up?"

Dr. Colleen Flood about "Wait Times in Canada"

On November 26th and 27th, 2007, health care and policy experts from across the country were invited to help write the prescription for managing wait times for health care at the Wait Times in Canada conference, co-hosted by Kingston General Hospital and Queen's University.

At the conference, someone from InsiderMedicine had a chance to speak to Dr. Colleen Flood. Dr. Flood is Scientific Director of CIHR's Institute of Health Services and Policy Research (CIHR-IHSPR).

She is also a former Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto and a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy. She completed her Master of Laws (LL.M.) in 1994 and her Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) in 1998 at the University of Toronto.

Her areas of research interest include comparative health care policy, public/private financing of health care systems, health care reform, and accountability and governance issues. She was the 1999 Labelle Lecturer in Health Services Research and was appointed a Senior Fellow of Massey College in 2004 and in 2006 on to the Corporation of Massey College.

"Find out what Dr. Flood has to say about the health care system in Canada compared to the rest of the world and wait times in particular in this Flash video:"

In Depth - "Wait Times in Canada" - Dr. Colleen Flood