A woman in a New Brunswick hospital had to face an 11-hour wait time before eventually succumbing to her illness.
Marianne Porter was admitted to the emergency room at Moncton Hospital for what was believed to be a hernia. Porter eventually died from kidney failure at 9am on Saturday.
Although Porter’s vitals were okay when she entered the hospital, she had to wait for a total of 11 hours before being seen by an emergency doctor. Doctors eventually attempted to treat Porter throughout the night but she eventually succumbed to her illness.
Moncton Hospital has been particularly hit with long wait times. Patients are often faced with being placed in the emergency room before being admitted to their appropriate ward.
The hospital has been struggling to meet its wait time target because of this issue.
“As much as we may look at the data in terms of numbers, in terms of wait times and percentages of hours, for example, at the end of the day, it is our patients and the community at large that we are failing by not meeting their needs in a more timely fashion,” said Dr. Serve Melanson, the president of the New Brunswick Medical Society.
This problem of long wait times and poor health-care availability extends beyond the province of New Brunswick.
In an interview with True North’s Andrew Lawton, Colin Craig, President of secondstreet.org, says 217,000 people left Canada to seek healthcare in the United States in 2017. However, the figure does not include Saskatchewan, Newfoundland, P.E.I, or Nova Scotia.
At the higher end of the statistic it’s around 324,000 people who have left Canada for healthcare reasons.
According to Craig, the reasons of medical travel are anecdotal and varied but many Canadians are also leaving the country for treatments which are offered by Canada’s healthcare system but endure long wait times.
The report by Second Street found that Canadians spent nearly $1.9 million per day for healthcare trips into other countries during 2017.
Craig notes in his interview with True North that not only wealthy Canadians were responsible for this spending but also people from the middle class.
“We’ve talked to a lot of middle income Canadians who are scraping the money together to go and get faster healthcare because they don’t want to pain for a year, they don’t want to wait months and months and months while a disease is potentially spreading throughout their body,” said Craig to True North.
While many Canadians have to face long wait times in the emergency room or elsewhere, in Porter’s case, both overcrowding and wait times were seen to have contributed to her eventual death.
