Quebecers have elevated the monitoring of emergency room overflows to a national sport in order to better choose where they will expiate their purgatory while waiting for a consultation that is often rushed through. It’s overflowing, what can you do! Many know by heart the waiting times for a cataract or the granting of a family doctor. By bombarding us with figures and tables to keep us informed of the slightest hiccup in the health network, have we forgotten that the patients caught between its meshes are not numbers?
In its annual report tabled Thursday, the Québec Ombudsman paints a picture of a state that increasingly “dehumanizes” its population in carrying out its missions, especially in health, but not only. A significant part of its report consists of documenting the ways in which our public services end up “depersonalizing” the people who knock on their doors by reducing them “to their problem” or “to their file number.”
For years, voices have been raised to warn us.
“The health care system is broken,” the director and actress Micheline Lanctôt complained in May of last year, in a letter written shortly after the death of her partner, crushed, she denounced, “by a system that had become inhumane.” Earlier, in January, it was Michelle Bourassa who took to the keyboard to speak out against the undignified fate reserved for her dying mother, Andrée Simard Bourassa, at 8e floor of St. Mary’s Hospital, “a place where,” she wrote, “humanity and dignity have been forgotten.”
If we hear the word “dehumanization” thrown around so often, it is because the fire has grown to the point where we have lost control of it. Insensitive to the thickening smoke, our institutions persist in welcoming these cries of despair as if they were the work of modern-day Cassandras who have gone astray. Scream, scream, nothing will remain, they tell them through their non-responses.
What the Ombudsman is saying today is: speak up, speak up, there will always be something left. He cites the case of this teacher who subjected students to what was ultimately recognized as psychological abuse. For ten years, the toxic file has been passed from hand to hand. Ten years of starting all over again at the start of each school year because the complaints from the previous year had ended up falling through the crack of state indifference.
It is clear that we need to better equip citizens, show them the voices that exist to defend their rights, amplify them, if necessary. Above all, we need to remind them that the machine that turns a deaf ear to them, or that only listens to them with one ear, is failing in its duties. That they have the right to demand accountability from this machine, made up of humans like them whose job is also to pass the baton so that no one falls or gets lost along the way.
There is indeed a “compassion fatigue” that colors our public services, notes Marc-André Dowd in his report. Being able to name it as such should be a right as well as a duty. Because when a procedure takes precedence over the human, it can become a source of suffering, stress and inequity. Especially if it is repeated. And even more so if the harm persists, because it is not taken care of.
Coincidentally, it was this week that coroner Julie-Kim Godin released her report on the suicide death of Amélie Champagne. Many Quebecers recognized themselves in the tortuous medical journey of the young woman, who consulted a “particularly significant number of health professionals,” in addition to undergoing multiple tests. Theories followed one another as the medical journey continued, leading to no diagnosis, no solution, no relief, even partial.
Her symptoms eventually culminated in severe psychological suffering that was not taken as seriously as she was entitled to expect.me Champagne felt diminished, abandoned, not believed, time and time again, notes the coroner, who compares her journey to that of a relay race in which the runners – here the caregivers – put “the baton on the ground without worrying about passing it on usefully to their teammate and the success of the race.”
The system failed to soothe Amélie Champagne and maintain a connection with her. At 22, Mme Champagne paid with his life for the phenomenon of revolving doors in psychiatric emergency rooms in Quebec. It is high time to break down the compartmentalization and ordinary rigidities that are holding up the public system.
Because dehumanization weighs heavily on bodies and minds. Those of patients, but also those of caregivers, caught in the same vice. The Act on the governance of the health and social services system, adopted on December 9, provides for the implementation of a local management method on a human scale. However, we do not yet know how.
This is an urgent task: all these suffering voices deserve to be heard and taken care of until the end.