Health care ‘crumbling’: BC specialists write letter to Adrian Dix

Article content material

A bunch of greater than two dozen medical specialists has ripped Well being Minister Adrian Dix in an open letter complaining they’re watching their sufferers endure and die on intractable and worsening ready lists.

Article content material

The 26 specialist medical doctors — led by Dr. Cassandra Lane Dielwart, an orthopedic surgeon in Kelowna — says the province’s “crumbling” health-care system is letting sufferers down, one million of whom are on wait lists which might be solely getting worse.

Article content material

Within the letter distributed Wednesday, the group calls on Dix to arrange an pressing assembly and work co-operatively with the specialists to search out options.

“Our complete health-care system is crumbling, however not sufficient is being carried out to enhance specialist affected person outcomes or shorten our overcrowded wait lists,” writes the group, which incorporates cardiologists, pediatricians, transplant surgeons and lots of different specialists.

“If we don’t work collectively to search out options, specialty care on this province goes to erode even additional.”

Article content material

The letter notes persistent challenges lately, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, imply “sufferers are getting sicker and dying on our wait lists.”

Regardless of the efforts of major care suppliers, the letter says “pressing major care centres and emergency departments are overwhelmed and might’t present speedy entry to specialists” — and the issue isn’t restricted to delays for surgical procedures.

“Lengthy surgical wait occasions are probably the most extensively recognized, however the disaster in wait occasions extends to the whole breadth of specialist care,” it reads, providing a number of examples out of “a whole lot, if not hundreds” of comparable tales:

• A affected person with sudden listening to loss who’s completely listening to impaired attributable to being pressured to attend;

Article content material

• “Greater than 16,000 folks ready for an echocardiogram in Vancouver Coastal Well being alone”;

• Sufferers in Metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island ready two to 3 months for an oncologist to see them after a brand new most cancers prognosis;

• A Northern Well being respirologist, the one one in her space, pressured to shut her observe to new sufferers for the previous two years as she catches up;

• And sufferers “ready on tenter-hooks for weeks for his or her lab outcomes and surgical pathology due to prolonged backlogs in our labs.”

The specialists say they’re writing on behalf of sufferers, a lot of whom “are sometimes too sick to advocate for themselves. We have to stabilize and strengthen our specialty care infrastructure to help this weak inhabitants.”

Article content material

The medical doctors say they’re “exhausted and demoralized” as they watch specialist care proceed to say no.

“It’s soul-destroying to be unable to offer the specialty care that B.C. sufferers want and deserve. We request a gathering with you emergently, and that’s not a phrase we use frivolously.”

Postmedia has reached out to Well being Minister Adrian Dix for a response.

For extra well being information and content material round illnesses, situations, wellness, wholesome residing, medicine, therapies and extra, head to Healthing.ca – a member of the Postmedia Community.