‘Care’ has disappeared from health care

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/01/2023 (715 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OVER the past three years, significant column inches in the Free Press have been devoted to analysis of the continuing failures in our health-care system. The onset of COVID-19 only exacerbated the deficiencies and accelerated the near-complete disintegration of the entire system.

This armageddon should have been easily foreseen, as it was becoming readily apparent to those who lived the experience day-to-day — namely, the front-line health-care professional, and the patients under their care. However, their voices were lost amid the strident winds of ideological clashes among politicians, and the ill-thought-out opinions of the puffed-up consultants each faction engaged in support of their respective positions.

How many times must health-care professionals and local residents have warned anyone who cared to listen that the amalgamation/consolidation of emergency care centres, the closure of quick-care clinics and confining specialty care to only one specific centre would lead to increased wait times and sub-optimal outcomes?

How many times must doctors and nurses have warned anyone who cared to listen that the creation of super-bureaucracies in Shared Health, regional health authorities and bloated hospital administrations would lead to inefficient allocation of resources needed on the front lines?

Beds, staff in support of those beds, labs, clinics, equipment… all under-resourced in the name of cost-savings. Meanwhile, six-figure-salaried “administrators” luxuriated in their sinecures.

How many times must health-care aides, home-care staff and family members have warned anyone who cared to listen that the curtailment of service standards, understaffing and tightened time allocations for performance of care duties to bed-bound clients would lead to poorer patient outcomes?

How often must families and friends have sounded alarms about the staffing levels and care standards that were being downgraded, especially in for-profit elder-care facilities with little or no government oversight?

The litany of mistakes goes on, but let me provide a sad, but glaringly typical, example of this descent into the inhumane conditions we now see. A friend of ours is a retired health-care professional who is now dealing with end-of-life issues as she awaits transition to palliative/hospice care. Although she dedicated her life to serving and caring for others, she is bed-ridden in hospital and she is not receiving the compassionate and dignified care she needs.

If not for the continuing vigilance and insistence of her family, she would not be helped up to use a commode… and the assistance she does receive comes only once a day! Even at that, she is admonished to hurry up as there are others needing similar attention, and there is so little staff time to attend.

She is told it would be easier if she used the bedpan or diapers instead, and if staff could wash her up at the same time, that’d be great. She is told she cannot be helped up more frequently because staff are afraid of being fired if she falls.

Physiotherapy needed to keep her from getting weaker is rationed to a few minutes at the end of the day, well past the optimum time to actually help her.

To compound the outrageous circumstances she finds herself in, she fears her care will be even more curtailed if she advocates too loudly for her care and safety. Imagine a system built on fear, not care!

COVID-19 has merely hastened the demise of “care” that was supposed to be provided, and we are all seeing the results of this fiasco. Health care has become an exercise in statistics, algorithms, clipboard decision-making and federal-provincial finger-pointing, all labouring under the smoke screen of patient and health information confidentiality. It is process and cost-driven, not patient-driven.

Of course, no one from the health minister’s or premier’s office will be made available for comment, but a boiler-plated and utterly useless response from Shared Health will be forthcoming.

And the indignities, inhumanity and preventable tragedies will continue, until we collectively get so fed up that we launch whatever class-action legal proceedings are necessary to return to patient-centred care.

Stewart Fay is a local commentator on social justice issues.