From Global TV (in Regina). (H/T Jojo)
Excerpt:
As the Alberta Health Services Board gathers to determine the fate of its CEO, tens of thousands of Albertans are still waiting for surgery while complete operating rooms sit empty.
“I was bed ridden for about three months,” says Michel Gosselin, who needs surgery on his back. “I’ve been in pain for a year and two months.”
Dr. Robert Hollingshead, an orthopaedic surgeon, says patients like Michel often wait upwards of a year once they’re finally booked for surgery. It’s a problem doctors and surgeons in all fields face because of a serious shortage of operating rooms in Alberta.
Despite pleas to the Province, little progress has been made even though a number of new operating rooms have been built, including six operating rooms that were originally used by the Health Resource Centre to perform 1,000 public hip, knee and ankle surgeries a year.
However, the Health Resource Centre is now defunct after AHS ended its relationship with the private surgical facility to in October, forcing it into creditor protection.
[…]…AHS opened the McCaig Tower at the Foothills Hospital, touting that it would offer 23 new operating rooms, 11 of which were already complete.
But one month later, less than 2 have been opened.
“It’s a travesty to open 11 state-of-the-art operating rooms in an almost $560-million facility and then open only 2 of them, and in fact, only run 1.4 – they’ve only staffed it for 1.4,” says Dr. Hollingshead.
Fifteen functional operating rooms sit empty in Calgary alone while the health system is so busy that new surgeons will likely have no place to operate.
Dr. Hollingshead predicts if the situation doesn’t improve Alberta could lose as many as 30 graduating surgeons over the next 5 years.
Singple-payer health care in Canada is not as good as the left wants you to believe.
