Canada

This is a symptom of a twofold problem. First, additional staffing and resources for ERs would help to reduce wait times, but I think the more important issue is lack of primary care, which would help patients avoid needing to go to the ER in the first place.

I'm not much of a fan of the way the article is written. Of course there are going to be some cases where a LWBS has serious complications, but locally (and anecdotally), our ER seems to operate more as a walk in clinic at times, and doctors will often see more patients there than they would in a typical clinic day. I feel like the non-emergent visits are likely a considerable part of the 6.8% LWBS rate, and could be offset by a better supply of family physicians. Unfortunately, at least in Saskatchewan, that would require a government willing to do anything whatsoever to help the healthcare system.

I live in Québec.

If you want to go to a walk-in medical clinic without an appointment and see a doctor for an emergency, you have to register for an appointment online on a government website. Yes. You take an appointment for a no-appointment walk-in clinic emergency visit.

You have to know when EACH clinic posts its schedule for the next day (none of them post at the same time btw) so you can log in and TRY to get an appointment. But the system is so clogged up that it's nearly impossible to get an appointment.

But I found a hack.

If you go to the emergency at the HOSPITAL - which doesn't require an appointment - you can ask at the triage if you can be given an appointment the next day at a clinic near your home. They apparently have a priority access in the appointment system and can give you one. This way you wait one hour tops, and you get an appointment to see a doctor. That's how I've done it the last couple of times.

In addition, in Québec we used to have local neighborhood public clinics called CLSC. They used to be like mini hospitals with a few services like the possibility of getting X-rays for example. If you needed to see a doctor, your could walk in, register and within a few hours you'd have seen a doctor and got the prescriptions, services or references you needed and that was it. You would RARELY go to the hospital for an emergency thanks to this.

Over time these CLSC clinics were downsized, and defunded and basically reduced to only services that can be provided by nurses, like taking blood samples and vaccines and a few services for old people. This happened over time thanks to heavy austerity measures from the provincial Liberal party that was in power for about 15 years with a neo-conservative leader and then ending up with an actual doctor as the premier who rigged the system to enable doctors to have their own private clinics and giving all doctors huge pay raises before getting voted out.

It's crazy that over the last decades, conservatives have fought tooth and nail against any foreign aid or immigration under the false assertion that "we need to take care of our own", meanwhile any time they have any freedom to do so, they decidedly "take care of our own" less and less.

And yet Doug Ford has a majority in Ontario, Tim Houston has a majority in Nova Scotia, Danielle Smith has a majority in Alberta, Scott Moe has a majority in Saskatchewan, and Bill Oliver has a majority in New Brunswick.

Who's voting for these troglodytes? Who's looking at the options of "a better future for real people, or a worse future for real people" and choosing the latter? Surely it's not all just in the name of bad memes and "owning the libs"... right?

I bet Douggy and his Private hospital friends are dancing right now... on the 2B+ dollars that hasn't been spent.

A part of our heritage

If you're leaving you don't need to be there in the first place.

I went a couple months ago, waited 2 hours, and then was hospitalized for a week.

My girlfriend went 4 days ago. Waited 3 hours for stitches.

If you're able to leave, you never should've come in the first place.

It's quite horrible in some part of Québec, you can wait 48h in ER :-/

At the least we need more walk-in clinics/urgent care with Nurse Practitioners, actually open and staffed. If you want to go really crazy make sure they have doctors, and if you are truely insane enough to fund a functioning healthcare system, make sure people have access to a family doctor to start with.