Tag Archives: Waiting List

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How do governments control costs in a single-payer health care systems?

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Take a look at what a new study shows about UK’s National Health Service. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Financial pressures may mean junior doctors are not given training posts within the NHS and the overall number of places at medical school could drop, a report has said.

This is despite extra burdens on the health service, including European rules limiting doctors’ hours, more hospital admissions and people living longer than ever before, according to the study from the UK Royal Colleges of Physicians (RCP).

Those specialties dedicated to looking after very ill people are facing particular strain, it said.

Dr Andrew Goddard, RCP director of medical workforce, said the combination of factors was ‘adding further stress to a system which may reach breaking point within the next few years’.

In 2009, the number of consultant posts created across the UK increased by 10.2 per cent.

However, financial pressures on the NHS mean that rise may not continue and there are ‘growing fears’ of a lack of training posts for young doctors.

Dr Goddard said: “We have already seen a drop in the number of new posts being advertised in 2010, and although we have enough doctors in training to develop a consultant-delivered NHS, these doctors need to have jobs to go into if this service is to be realised.”

The latest study comes after the RCP in England warned last week of patients being left in the hands of junior doctors because of inadequate consultant cover on weekends.

And here’s how it works out in Canada, which is a pure single-payer system – the kind that Democrats want to enact here in the USA.

Excerpt:

It’s no surprise to Thelma Lee that emergency room wait times are not meeting provincial targets.

Lee said her 41-year-old daughter, Marlene Stephens, died Saturday after waiting nearly 90 minutes at the William Osler Health Centre’s Etobicoke campus emergency room with breathing problems.

Lee feels her daughter was not seen fast enough by medical staff.

“They didn’t touch her,” said the grieving Lee. “She was crying out, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe’. . . Nobody attended to my daughter.”

On Monday, Auditor General Jim McCarter released his annual report which found that despite putting an extra $200 million into shortening emergency room wait times over the last two years, “significant province-wide progress has not yet been made.”

“Complaints about overcrowding and delays in hospital emergency rooms have persisted for years,” McCarter told a news conference on Monday.

Emergency room waits for people with serious conditions sometimes reached 12 hours or more, the report said. That is far greater than the province’s 8-hour wait time target, the report found.

And for emergency patients who need a hospital bed, they waited on average for about 10 hours but some waited 26 hours or more, according to the 2010 Annual Report.

“Our audit found that wait times for patients with less serious ailments have been reduced somewhat,” McCarter said. “However, there has been only minimal progress in reducing wait times for patients with more serious conditions.”

If this woman had offered to BUY her own health care in Canada, she would have been ARRESTED. That’s “equality” in a socialist system. Everyone has an equal right to scream in agony while waiting in line for a doctor. And the most productive people have the additional joy of shoveling half of their salaries into the coffers of bureaucrats to waste on expensive family vacations at taxpayer expense.

In fact, the provincial government of Ontario is very busy right now trying to push a gay rights curriculum onto grade 1 students (and up) in public and private schools – that’s what they do with the money that Canadians are forced to pay them – they BUY VOTES FROM LIBERAL SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS SO THEY CAN GET RE-ELECTED. They don’t have money for health care. They have their hands full with social engineering.

When you give the government your money, it’s theirs to spend on whatever they want – while you die on an emergency room floor. When you keep your money in your own pocket, you get to use it to buy whatever you want – including life-saving medical care.

And do you know where the Liberal Ontario bureaucrats go when they need health care? The United States of America! Dying is for the plebians – the elites go to the capitalist health care system down south. Equality for thee, not for me.

Do not vote for secular leftists – if you value your life – DO NOT DO IT.

News

In Alberta, tens of thousands of patients are waiting for surgery

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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.

 

News

Canadian woman has miscarriage after 3 hour wait in ER

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From the Prince Edward Island Guardian. (H/T The Way The Ball Bounces)

Excerpt:

Losing her first baby was devastating enough but having to do it in a crowded waiting room is what angered Christine Handrahan the most.

The 29-year-old Peakes woman was nine weeks pregnant when on July 12 she started bleeding.

Fearing the worst, Handrahan and her husband, Michael, headed to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s new emergency room.

There she waited more than three hours, blood seeping out of her jeans, tears rolling down her face as she feared she was losing her baby — or that she might be bleeding to death.

Still, she waited and waited.

More than three hours passed before Michael had enough.

Only one patient had gone through the big glass doors to see a doctor so he knew the wait was going to be extensive.

Michael helped his wife out of a wheelchair into his truck and they made the 45-minute drive to Prince County Hospital in Summerside. There she was immediately rushed into the hospital’s emergency room where the mother-to-be was told that she had a miscarriage.

[…]Handrahan says nobody at the hospital showed her any compassion.

“They could have given me a room to go in. Not necessarily a room with a bed. Even if it had been their TV room, or their lunchroom, or their closet. That waiting room was jam packed full of people.

“Somebody should have cared enough to say ‘Oh my goodness, you’re going through a miscarriage, do you need some quiet time?’ I was fighting my tears. I wanted a place to go cry.”

[…]Health Minister Carolyn Bertram maintains safety is not being compromised at the Charlottetown hospital.

Click through all 3 pages, until you have supped full with horrors, as the Thane of Glamis would say. And don’t worry, the socialist executive director apologized – although she would not say that the miscarriage was inappropriate. So we’re all good, right? Well, the bureaucrat is good – because she already got paid through your taxes. And no, you can’t have your money back. And good luck suing the government, too. They’ll use more of your tax money to overpay their defense lawyers.

But if you need an abortion or a sex change? No problem – then it’s free courtesy of Canadian taxpayers.

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