Skip to content

Far too many non-emergency problems showing up in emergency wards

When I was a kid, you didn’t go to ER unless something was broken, you were bleeding or your fever was making you incoherent.

When I was a kid, you didn’t go to ER unless something was broken, you were bleeding or your fever was making you incoherent.

Mom was the doctor in the house. Food and rest were the medicines. Drugs were very expensive and only taken if deemed to be absolutely necessary.

Chicken soup, barley soup, onion soup. Hot baths, hot water bottles, hot mustard plasters all dealt with colds and flu. Cold compresses worked on the rest.

Soda pop was an expensive luxury to be tasted a few times a year, usually one bottle shared between us three siblings. We ate lots of beans and pasta — not because we were on the Mediterranean diet.

We were poor!

No one drove us to swimming lessons in summer. We walked or rode our bikes. And we ended up at the pool most of the day, paying for our lessons by working as swim teachers to younger folk — thus swimming pretty much all day!

Our TV was broken most of the time and we didn’t have the money to fix it, so we learned to pluck out tunes on a non-electric piano; my brothers taught themselves to read music and started a band out of boredom. We played board games and worked the summer in the yard, planting and harvesting the garden that would feed us fresh local grown veggies for the next six months.

Our workout was in the backyard. Our personal trainer was the weather. Our sport in winter was gymnastics, once a week for which we paid admission of a dollar a year.

We face an ER crisis in Alberta, but why? Is it really a lack of services, or is it our rising expectations of perfect health versus our general lack of personal commitment to maintain our health as individuals?

While I do think the health care system is a mess, bloated and lumbering, pocked with corrupting practices — but I also have to say it reflects society as a whole.

When I took a friend to ER recently on suspicion of appendicitis, it turned out thee patient was massively constipated. To my surprise the nurse said that they gets lots of people in for that same problem, especially teenagers. She thought it was probably diet and lying around playing video games.

According to an article by Dr. Lou Francescutti of a few years back, based on his ER experience, something like 60 per cent of people in his urban ER were there due to alcohol-related accident injuries, something like 40 per cent of those were chronic, repeat visitors. http://www.drlou.ca/articles.asp#substanceabuse

However the system doesn’t provide a ‘wellness’ program for these individuals. No substance counselor might intervene at this point. Nope. Stitch ‘em up and send ‘em out. See ya next week!

Likewise an Edmonton ER nurse told me how many homeless people use emergency services in winter — arriving by ambulance on cold days with wounds — some self-inflicted. It’s one way to get a warm place, a hot meal, a painkiller, some human attention.

This is soul-destroying for the plastic surgeons who fix the wound — which returns from the grubby streets later as an infection, then an amputation.

The real problem is not health at all. What a costly way for us taxpayers to avoid dealing with the issue!

It’s addiction, mental illness, or poverty. Not the kind of poverty I grew up in. This kind of poverty makes you crazy. It is virtually impossible to live simply, with dignity, in this society without bags of money.

Forget about ER wait times. Let’s assess the content of the traffic jams – who’s who in ER and why are they there? Let’s deal with the root problems.

One simple way to help solve the problem is to massively tax the junk food that is creating chronic health problems like heart and stroke problems, obesity and diabetes. Use that tax money to underwrite medical services.

Let’s limit the number of junk food ads that can run on TV or ban them altogether like we did for cigarettes and alcohol. Let’s require grocery stores to place healthy foods in prominent places, not candy or pop. Let’s ban the sale of chocolate and junk food in pharmacies.

I hate to say these things — we do live in a democracy — but can we afford to self-destruct over junk food?

Taxpayers cannot support the financial burden of the current health care demands — especially when individuals are not going to make an effort to be fit themselves. No health system can ever cope with the burden of our ‘customer is always right’ fast food, immediate service mentality.

Nor can ER solve the broader social problems of drug (including OTC and prescription drug), alcohol and self-abuse.

However it could offer intervention. ER is also not a mental health ward — nor is it an outreach service for the homeless. It’s become both by default, primarily through the fault of the government which has cut funding for mental health and addictions, dumping these manifold problems onto the cops on the beat, the paramedics, the citizens and handful of small charities that are overwhelmed by demand.

It used to be very expensive for an individual to get sick. That’s why people made every effort to stay well. Now we have publicly funded health care, do we care about ourselves?

Like Stephen Duckett, too many of us still want to eat our cookie while we duck personal responsibility.

Likewise the Alberta government prefers to reduce wait times, rather than addressing the content or reasons for repeat ER visits; avoiding the reality that there is a lack of non-ER attention to substance abuse, homelessness, and overdoses of junk food.

The band-aid is wait times. Band-aids fall off.

Michelle Stirling-Anosh is a freelance writer from Ponoka.