As hundreds of thousands of British Columbians struggle to find a family doctor, wait times at emergency departments in two Lower Mainland hospitals exceeded seven hours this weekend.
On Sunday, B.C.’s live wait-time website estimated wait times of nine hours and 15 minutes at the B.C. Children’s Hospital, with an expected eight-hour, 40-minute length of stay.
At Vancouver General Hospital, the Sunday wait time reached seven hours and 51 minutes, with an expected length of stay of eight hours and nine minutes.
At the Richmond Hospital, it was an estimated five hours and 50 minutes to be seen by a doctor, with an extra six hours and 15 minutes after that.
With 900,000 British Columbians still waiting for a family doctor, Dr. Ramneek Dosanjh said more and more are flocking to emergency rooms, “overwhelming an overburdened system.”
Get weekly health news
“We can’t have this continue,” the Doctors of BC president told Global News.
“Short-term I think we definitely need to address the patient access issue and we need to be able to help physicians stay practicing … unfortunately, we have all been feeling the burnout from the pandemic.”
Dosanjh said many doctors have also struggled with the rising cost of doing business in B.C., including office space, and the administrative duties required.
On Tuesday, Health Minister Adrian Dix said a wait time of about two hours is a “significant length of time” at the B.C. Children’s Hospital, but the health-care system is “busy all the time, every single day.”
Emergency rooms triage cases, he added, and any seriously ill child will receive care right away.
“One of the reasons we put those numbers on the website … is to let people know what they can expect and that’s principally for people who might have other alternatives,” he explained.
“The variation in emergency room waits can be quite significant one day to another, because a number of people come in one case occupies a long time or whatever. That’s what you’d expect in the health-care system.”
The B.C. Children’s Hospital did not comment on the weekend’s wait times or strategies to alleviate the backlog. Vancouver Coastal Health, meanwhile, said it could not meet Global News’ deadline.
A recent report by MediMap, B.C. had the worst walk-in clinic wait times in Canada in 2021: on average, about an hour at any clinic, in any city on any given day. It’s a 35-per-cent increase from wait times in 2019.
“This primary care crisis is affecting children, our geriatric patients, women’s health, mental health … in all communities across the province,” said Dosanjh. “We are all committed and deeply affected by what our patients are saying on the ground.”
Comments