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Ya but have you seen the hours those new clinics keep? We’re in no better shape now than we were before.
I honestly don’t know who calls the shots on these clinics or who owns them but from what my family doc has told me there are a handful of private companies that control the majority of them. His clinic was bought out by one of these companies and the hours changed from being open from 8am to 8pm to 10am to 3pm. They then limited walk ins to 1 hour per day and then turned around and wanted to sell client info to drug companies which is why he left that clinic after refusing to sign off his patient info.

I can’t personally think of one single 24 walk in clinic in Calgary. I know when I lived in Edmonton there was one up on Jasper Ave but I haven’t found one here. The government should be regulating the hours these clinics are open if they want these new clinics to have any impact on ER times.

   

If people would go to their family doctors instead of Emergency for flus, colds, etc, there'd be no problem. The biggest clog in the system is user-fault, not system fault.

   

I totally agree but I think the whole problem centers around the fact that it's next to imposable to see your family doctor in a timely manner. If I book an appointment with my family doc I'm looking at a minimum week wait time. That doesn't do you much good for a flu or cold.

You hit the nail on the head but I think people going to ER for things they should see their family phys. is just a symptom of the actual problem. There aren't enough services avalible for "lesser" conditions.

   

Better yet, don't go at all. You can't fix a flu or a cold. It's hard to understand why people go to a doctor for either.

   

Seriously?

The problem is not funding, but rather the WASTE of said funding where far too much is spent on administration versus actual health care.

   

I'm guessing you don't have children. If your 3 year old is puking all day long and running a fever I would hope you go see a doctor as opposed to waiting it out. Same goes for colds, many colds turn into infections which need to be treated to avoid further complications.

   

been there done that..

Still no reason to run to the emergency for a cold. It isn't going to turn into a killer infection in 24 hrs.

Vomiting is not related to a cold or influenza virus. Usually its the Norwalk virus aka the shit bug that kids and cruise ship passengers like to pass to each other.

We've all seen it. Emergency rooms filled with adult snifflers while you sit there waiting for 20 stitches to close a gash in your arm.

   

What ever happend to minor emergency clinics. My grand daughter is a gymnast. She is, on a regular basis, hurting herself at practice. It takes several weeks to get in to see her sports med doctor. Going to see the GP at the minor emerg calls for a wait, but it's not too long, usually about half an hour. X-ray lab is attached and that saves time. I only have gone to emerg at a hospital one time in my life. An appointment with my regular doctor takes about a week, but he runs a daytime hours minor emergency clinic too without a lab attached.

   

if it's a gash in your arm, skin deep you can wait. If it's the sniffles, it's not an emergency and should be directed to a nurse who can suggest an over the counter product. I'll bet if you show up with symptoms of a heart attack or a dangerous abdominal cavity knife wound you bypass the seats for sniffles and go right in.

   

That's completely true, but as others have said it can be very difficlt to get a family doctor, and once you have one it's usually a few days or a week to get in. I'm lucky enough that I had the same doctor from the time I was a kid until he gave up his practice to go work in a hospital. Then the doctor who took his practice inheirited me. Poor woman

It still takes a week to get in to see her, althoug I will admit that the last time I called to say it was kind of an emergency perscription situation she squeezed me in for 5 minutes that day.

   

My family doctor of decades has now joined a clinic. So while my file is there, I have no guarantee it will be him I see. But I rarely go to a doctor, so it's no big deal at the moment. As I get the inevitable stuff that comes with aging, it's not a good development.

User fees sound like a good idea, because they make people value the service they receive more. But, they also discourage people from going to the doc, especially low income people. That can result in huge costs to the system later, as happens in the US with the uninsured. maybe make health care costs a taxable benefit, with limits so nobody is seriously hurt by the costs, but the well off pay more than the less so. You know, socialized medicine.

   

Because we can't get doctors to live here the ER was open only a few days a month in the last while. Hundreds of 2 man ambulance trips either 1 or 2 hours each way.
Specialists are all in Prince George, so Northern Health runs a bus a couple times a week up and down Hwy16. Full of people "helping" coming back with all their shopping - so Greyhound wants to cut service from 5 to 1 day a week for lack of ridership.
The kitchen is closed in the local hospital. So food gets trucked in from the Hospital in the next town, meanwhile people are running around looking for grants to do Meals on Wheels. The seniors are complaining about cold sandwiches from out of town.
Meanwhile every hospital has an administration which makes no real decisions, as policies are province wide. Every area has a Health Authority full of staff.
Not one ounce of common sense is used in the delivery of Health Care.
Cut the staff. Cut the nurse's pay. Privatize services until you have people who won't clean up shit or puke for minimum wage so an RN has to do it. Insist only a doctor can put on a cast or stitch a cut, etc.
And yes, the Emergency here is full of drunks and old people with colds. There's no support or policy for anything else.

   

Old people should be getting in home visits by RN's. Sniffles can develop into something much more serious for them very quickly, just like babies. Drunks, you're not going to stop them going to ER if you have a small fee for it. (Druggies neither). They're not going to stop doing their thing, and good luck trying to collect from them.

The first stop for anybody that's not in serious trouble should be a nurse practitioner, who can either deal with it herself or refer on. I see the NP's are advertising now for an expanded role, but good luck trying to fight the doctor's lobby.

   

And we "get" a 16 million dollar heli-platform that is not being used (heli's still go the airport and patients are transported by ambulance from there), while RN's and techs only get hired on a casual basis.

   

Colds and flu can be fatal for seniors if left untreated so that's why they go to the ER if they catch something. My mom ended up in an ICU for three weeks about five years back when she got pneumonia. No one has the right to judge why someone else is in an ER. And a lot of people get told to go to ER by nurses when they call in to one of the HealthLink advice phone-ins. The problem is still that, after a million goddamn studies and media reports later, the governments and the hospitals refuse to have an adequate enough number of ER staff (especially doctors) on duty at any given time. The rest of the discussion is all just whistling Dixie.

   

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