Alright so I’m visiting Quebec and I get sick. I go to the hospital and fear the worst which is of course the waiting time to see a doctor. After getting registered in their system, I am told it will be a little while. I think to myself, lovely, how long is this going to take…Literally five minutes later I’m in a bed, and within six hours, during which I receive blood tests and an ultrasound, I am out the doors and good to go.
Home in NS, people wait six hours just in the waiting room… If ones going to a local hospital and not the 24 hr emerg! you could be there all day… While Quebec could learn a bit from us, we can definitely learn from them in the health care department. I’m telling ya. They know how to deal with sick people here. —ItsNikkiGuys
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2014.
I received much better care when I was in Ontario. I lived in Ottawa for a summer and had to get prescriptions written out because you can’t fill/refill prescriptions in Ontario that were written out of province. During my first visit to a walk in clinic, I waited maybe 10 minutes, I had an offer to take me on as a patient by a family doc. I mentioned that I was from NS and just living there for the summer and the doc told me that their clinic had a practising endocrinologist and internal specialist and foot clinics all covered by OHIP for diabetic patients if I wanted a referral. In Nova Scotia, foot care is not covered, unless you have an ulcer, and by then it’s often too late. In another instance, my kidneys were acting up and my blood pressure shot up. The other walk in clinic doctor I saw had me come in weekly to monitor my BP!
I’m really beginning to think that NS’s health care strategy is to let as many people die as possible to wipe them off the list of those needing services.
Though, it could be worse: we could all live in No Funswick where they don’t even have a government funded catastrophic drug plan — meaning people with cancer, HIV/AIDS, people who need anti rejection drugs, etc… don’t get support from the government. At least the NS government has catastrophic drug coverage… and a prescription plan for those of us without insurance. When my dad was on IV antibiotics for a year, Capital Health just sent the meds out to his pharmacy and he picked them up for free. That shit is thousands a month.
Fuck Quebec, bunch of sissy Frenchmen!!!!
It’s simple, there is just more money to throw at medical care in Quebec than in Nova Scotia.
If Quebec does offer better health care it’s due to a massive budget deficit and an ever-increasing debt. You get what you pay for.
We could have “better” health care in Nova Scotia but it would likely mean paying more taxes. Good luck getting anyone to agree to that!
If the NS government trimmed the fat, we would all feel better.
In the past 15 years I’ve had the misfortune of visiting the QEII emergency department once. In retrospect, I should have called an ambulance – but not having any health insurance I chose to call a cab. As triage staff thought that I was more or less ambulatory, I had a lovely wait of 4+ hours deep breathing through an acute diverticulitis attack. This while watching people with coughs and children with “boo boos” being treated.
When I finally dropped to the floor unconscious, this evidently caught Emerg staff’s attention and I was duly admitted and treated over the next couple of weeks. Good times.
First off, people who use the emergency room as a family physician need to truly assess their situation and ask themselves if in fact they are suffering from an emergency … i.e. critical care is required immediately. Not a band aid or pain killers to feed a habit. Sadly, this is very hard to manage from a health care perspective.
Secondly, I look forward to the amalgamation of Nova Scotia Regional Health Authorities. The administrative bloat and resultant wasteage of tax payer monies needs to cease.
Will this result in better care? Not immediately but the dividends will pay off as a single administration looks to improve delivery of services AND cut costs province wide and not concern itself with “regionalism” except as it relates to the efficient delivery of services.
Note that “efficient” does not mean universality of services to every little town and hamlet. Oh ya, a counter bitch … can we tear the VG down immediately?
Go suck a lemon, WHATACROCK
I don’t know what might have been going on in Quebec the day you went but I have lived there for three years, made multiple trips to the ER and health clinics, and I can say confidently that I’ve never had less than a three hour wait. At the ER it’s closer to eight hours (minimum) and often goes overnight where you are placed on a bed in the middle of a hallway and completely ignored by passing doctors and nurses for hours at a time. I have had friends go in requesting blood tests and others having averse reactions to medication.. same thing. Doctor’s don’t even seem to really care what the problem is so long as you can walk yourself out. It’s unbelievable. I have not gone through the NS health care lately, but if your claim is true and it is worse……well i cannot even imagine that.
Maybe it WAS a one-off, likeitis.
I’ve had experiences with the ER in Halifax where I was taken in right away, and then I had a 13 hour wait with my mom while she waited for a neuro consult.
Plus, if you’re from NS and travelling to Quebec, you better have travel insurance – they don’t accept MSI cards in la belle province and you gotta pay out of pocket and get reimbursed when you get home.
You got lucky. Watch the first 5 minutes of Denis Arcand’s “Les invasions barbares”. Usual ER wait in some quebec hospitals I worked in was 18+ hours and you were lucky if you didn’t get C. diff. I wouldn’t change ours for theirs ever.