The Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) recently announced plans to open two private hospitals that can accommodate clients who do not need hospitalization, promising “very reasonable” waiting times. This project would relieve congestion in our public hospitals, which have been seriously dragging their feet… for a very long time!
I wondered where we were going to recruit all the staff to work in these private hospitals, the nurses, orderlies, technologists and administrative officers. Perhaps we think that the nurses of the public hospital network, these precious nurses, often crushed by compulsory overtime, will want to work even more by splitting in private hospitals.
My dear attendants, who are struggling to ensure basic dignity for our patients, will they increase their work week to 70 hours to go “moonlighter” in the private sector? It’s simple math. If you need ten people to provide a service, but you only have seven, how many are missing? If we increase staffing needs by opening a new branch, how many new employees have we found? In fact, here, everything is lost and nothing is created.
By the way, why are patients waiting so long in my ER? It is precisely because I do not have staff to help me ensure the process and the flow of patients entering or leaving the rooms, to prepare the examination rooms, to take blood samples, to give the medication, helping elderly people change so that I can examine them, making calls or filling out requests, arranging transport for patients… It really slows down the flow, all that, when you only have half a nurse instead of two, because the nurse present is divided between two functions, for six hours, on a work shift! And what about the intensive care units in my hospital, which since the beginning of the summer have had to close 50% of their beds… for lack of staff! And the same can be said of the other floors of the hospital.
Please don’t tell me that the patient who comes to the ER to refill their blood pressure medication is clogging up our ER. No more than the one who comes with a cold, by the way… These kind of patients only take up three minutes of my time, from beginning to end: “Hello, you don’t have a family doctor? What medicine do you take? Since when ? » I enter the computerized system Dossier Santé Québec, I check the dosage, and I redo the prescription. ” Thank you good night ! »
This patient does not require administrative time, nor does he require an attendant or nurse, once triage and registration have been completed. It does not require a blood test or x-ray. Sending him to a private hospital will do absolutely nothing to change the waiting time for people who are sick and who need our care in the public sector.
But this patient, instead of waiting four hours in my waiting room before being seen, will only wait 30 to 60 minutes in one of the new private hospitals. He will no doubt be called by one of my clerks who was disgusted with his public working conditions. His blood pressure will be taken by one of my nurses who was about to do a burnout to the public. And the chair on which he was sitting will be disinfected by one of my attendants who was fed up with being hit on the face by patients in crisis, who we are brought in regularly because we have not resources to care for them otherwise to the public.
Too many staff, yet so necessary to the functioning of our public system, will undoubtedly go to work in the new private, clean, efficient network. But, in doing so, these personnel will not treat patients who need hospitalization, surgery or examinations 24 hours a day, 7 days a week… We repeat: everything is lost, nothing is created. .