DR. ROBERT MILLER
Health care in Nova Scotia is in crisis.
Frontline emergency physicians, nurses and clerical staff have been pushed to a breaking point. Their voices need to be heard now more than ever, and not suppressed. Continuing a policy of shooting the messenger while denying a crisis exists is foolhardy.
The Nova Scotia Health Authority was supposed to be a politically independent, non-partisan body — it is neither. A recently released poll showed that 72 per cent of respondent physicians don’t trust the NSHA, and this lack of trust and credibility will very likely continue as long as the NSHA remains controlled by politics and politicians.
Nova Scotia needs to offer competitive pay and perks to primary care physicians if it expects to recruit and retain them. The Valley Regional Hospital emergency department saw an increase in orphaned patients of an astounding 265 per cent between the years 2013 and 2018 due to a deficiency in family physicians.
Long-term care beds are desperately needed in Nova Scotia. At present, as many as 20 per cent of the province’s acute care beds are being occupied by patients requiring long-term care. Not only is housing a patient in an acute care bed much more costly than in a long-term one, but this loss of acute care beds to long- term-care patients is the leading cause of hospital overcrowding, emergency department overcrowding and cancellations of surgeries and procedures.
While a recent provincial election in Ontario in 2018 saw all major parties promising increases in the numbers of long-term care beds of between 30,000 and 40,000 in the next 10 years in that province, the Nova Scotia government has yet to open a single new long-term-care bed since coming to power in 2013. Emergency departments within the province will not survive the upcoming demographic boom without addressing emergency department overcrowding and long-term-care deficiencies, as staff burnout will increase.
The Conference Board of Canada has studied the topic of long-term care requirements and issued a report in November 2017, funded by the Canadian Medical Association entitled, “Sizing Up the Challenge. Meeting the Demand for Long-term care in Canada.” In this report, it was deemed that Canada will need an additional 199,000 long-term care beds by 2035. The capital spending and operating costs for these beds will indeed be quite significant, but the benefits will outweigh the costs. It is predicted that the investment in long-term care beds will yield a return of $235 billion to real GDP and support an average of 123,000 jobs each year.
In the face of continued government inaction, a GoFundMe page for more long-term care beds in the Annapolis Valley has been initiated by concerned emergency physicians to draw the public’s attention to the need, spur action and put an end to hallway medicine in Nova Scotia.
Robert Miller is an emergency room physician in Kentville.
RELATED:
