Closed ERs an unwelcome Christmas present

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/12/2024 (529 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s always good to be clear about your Christmas season plans. Discuss what time Christmas dinner is going to be, who’s going to be bringing the maple-glazed brussels sprouts, how many people will want sweet potato mash and which member of your immediate household is absolutely, positively going to be the designated driver.

Oh, and if you’re in rural Manitoba, make sure you check the schedule.

The ER schedule.

If you’re planning to be dealing with a rapidly forming ice dam on your roof — with its accompanying living room water leak onto the couch where Aunt Betty always sits to open her presents — by heading up an outdoor ladder somewhere in the Interlake, be extra careful and maybe do the work sometime during the 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. window.

Of 12 hospital emergency rooms in the Interlake/Eastern region, only one is expected to be reliably open 24-7.

If you like to celebrate the day by finishing Christmas dinner with a Christmas pudding lit spectacularly ablaze with the blue wavering glow of rum flambé? Have a fire extinguisher at the ready or a cover to put over the pudding should things go wrong — or perhaps skip the tradition this year, because there are plenty of places where the nearest ER quite possibly won’t be ready for an influx of your guests, all sporting third-degree burns.

Right now, Doctors Manitoba estimates that three-quarters of this province’s 70 rural and northern emergency rooms will either be cutting their hours or closing this month. And the situation could conceivably get worse.

“For the 18 hospitals that are reliably open 24-7 this holiday, we know that many of those are open by a thread,” Dr. Nichelle Desilets, Doctors Manitoba’s president-elect, said at a news conference on Tuesday. “That means there’s a tenuous staffing situation, and there are services like emergency services and maternity services that are very close to having unexpected closures due to holes in the schedule.”

The situation is serious enough that the group is advising people to check ER schedules in advance at the hospitals nearest to their home, or nearest to the communities they will be travelling to over the holidays.

Stop and think about that for a moment.

There’s a very, very old saying about the administration of justice that goes like this: “Justice delayed is justice denied.” That’s because the ability to get a fair trial degrades as time passes: once too much time has gone by, it’s impossible to get a fair trial.

You could just as easily say that health care delayed is health care denied — perhaps not in every case, but certainly in cases where the delay involved with getting a critically ill patient to adequate treatment could result in permanent harm to that patient, or even their death.

More and more, across the entire health-care system, delays abound. Hours in emergency rooms click closer to days of waiting, with patients leaving without being seen. The delay for diagnostic work — things like colonoscopies that potentially reduce the strain on all sorts of medical services by their early diagnosis of problems — stretch out into months.

Provincial governments blame other, earlier provincial governments, and the number of closed emergency rooms clicks slowly upwards. Health care — delayed.

We don’t have to repeat the rest of the saying.

Have a festive holiday season. A Merry Christmas. But make it a safe and careful one, too.

It’s not a time for things like tightrope walking — there might not be a safety net. Or the net you’re used to counting on might have holes in it.