A 14-hour wait in the emergency room of the Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital over the weekend is highlighting the ongoing health care staffing crisis in Ontario.
Blawal Aleem and his wife spent Saturday evening, Saturday night and Sunday morning waiting for her to receive treatment.
They were told the wait was due to that fact there was only one doctor on shift in the hospital.
“Twelve-plus hours is not normal in any circumstance and she shouldn’t have to play the guessing game of when are we going to see the doctor,” said Aleem.
Aleem tells CityNews he and his wife were sent to the hospital’s ER by their family doctor and arrived around 6 p.m. Saturday night. They figured they would be home by midnight.
“Thirty minutes more, an hour more goes by, and then the hours just start to fly by. I’m coming outside checking on parking, but I don’t know how much to extend the parking by either,” shared Aleem. “And then we’re out of here by 8:30 a.m. which again is, is very unacceptable.”
While Aleem and his wife stuck out the marathon wait time, he said other patients walked out without receiving any care at all.
“It was packed, it was very busy and we were told that there’s only one doctor to service the entire hospital. Whether you’re a cancer patient, whether
you’re someone in ER or someone coming in for emergency, there’s just one doctor,” said Aleem.
Staffing shortages at hospitals have been a major concern for years.
Emergency rooms across the province have even had to temporarily shut down because there was just no doctor available to keep them running.
“I understand that there’s free healthcare. It’s a big blessing to have that and not have to pay out of pocket, but at the same time, it shouldn’t be cruel to the point where we have to sit for 12 hours,” Aleem added.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Ontario’s Ministry of Health says the Ford government has increased the healthcare budget by 31 per cent, hiring
thousands of new nurses and doctors and investing $44 million to tackle emergency department wait times.
But Aleem said clearly that investment hasn’t gone far enough. “You have to do something tangible that helps the long-term care home. It helps the hospitals. It helps the family doctors, and we’re able to kind of ease the burden on the citizens of Ontario.”
McKenzie Health, which runs Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital, tells CityNews in a statement that they are seeing very high patient volumes and “wait
times can be longer than any of us would like.”
“We’re operating over capacity and many patients are coming to us very sick and requiring admission,” read their statement. “We triage patients to ensure the sickest patients are seen as quickly as possible.”
They also say they have 10 to 11 physicians each day at the hospital and at least one physician scheduled between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. at each site and can call in additional doctors if needed.
