I saw an otolaryngologist this past September and was told I have a deviated septum. My appointment for a head CT, to check and see if I have chronic sinusitis (no mystery there) isn’t until the end of June. And that’s before surgery can be scheduled. My septum hurts and is annoying as hell, but it’s not going to kill me. The urgent life-saving stuff generally gets done in a timely fashion.
It ain’t perfect, particularly in Ontario and especially here in Toronto. There’s far too much hallway treatment going on due to lack of beds. And Doug Ford* targeted nurses with a cruel intensity before the pandemic that has contributed to the shortage there as well. But I’d still take Ontario’s system over any American state’s one any day.
*(and the bastard is likely going to be elected for yet another term in tomorrow’s election, which is depressing beyond comprehension, especially if PeePee gets into 24 Sussex later this year)
Also, a parallel/supplementary system of private health insurance makes the publicly-funded services not only less expensive, but less crowded. While the affluent are getting the benefits of shorter wait times and other advantages of the private system, the non-affluent in their turn are getting access to a public system with less burdensome demands on it. (Of course, that’s often offset by more resources going into the private instead of the public system, too.)
The UK has an insurance-based private system alongside the NHS. Some employers offer private healthcare as an incentive but the services offered are usually limited to the straightforward.
For example, you aren’t going to get a triple bypass or have a tumour extracted from your brain by a private hospital. They will replace a knee or even a hip as well as a myriad of minor surgeries.
The main benefits of private healthcare here are that there is no waiting list and you can schedule surgery to suit yourself and the surgeon. The hospitals are a bit nicer too with better food etc.
Ontario resident here. To echo what others have said, this story represents an extremely unusual circumstance – obviously, or it wouldn’t be a major news story.
I haven’t had knee replacement but my friend has – both knees but at different times. The wait times he experienced were within the nominal targets, which vary with location, specific hospital, and the non-emergency priority assigned to the case at the time of diagnosis (an emergency would be a whole different matter and treatment would be as close to “immediately” as physically possible). The targets vary between around two months to a little over three, and as I recall this is around what he experienced both times. It was sooner than he wanted – he was in no hurry to go under the knife!
As for infections (which is also part of the OP story) I had an infection in my arm once from a dog bite that started to become red and inflamed. I went to the doctor who treated it as best he could and then took a marker and drew a circle around the area. He said if the inflammation grew beyond the circled area, get myself to the ER right away.
Which it did, and so I did. I required two rounds of intravenous antibiotic. The first time I went to the ER, there was no wait at all, just went straight in for treatment. The second time I think I had to wait about half an hour.
So what happened to this poor woman described in the OP? One can speculate on specific reasons for the delays, including being bounced between one hospital and another with an infection that needed prompt treatment. One might even wonder how much of it could have been prevented had she been a more proactive patient advocate for herself.
But in general there seem to have been systemic faults in a complicated health care system, which I’d be inclined to describe in terms of the “Swiss cheese model” that’s used in aviation to describe how accidents happen despite numerous redundant safeguards. The idea is that every safeguard has some vulnerability, because nothing is perfect, and every once in a while each vulnerability lines up with another so that the consequences of a failure fall right through all the safeguards, and then very bad things happen. It’s a fancy way of saying “a rare instance of very bad luck”.
Oddly enough I had the exact same thing - infectious bursitis in my elbow. Walked into emerg, they circled the red nasty area, and put in an IV. I was in and out in 3 hours or so. I had to go back in 24 hours later for a planned second dose and it was the same 3 hours.
Imagine having the only cost be a Tim Hortons coffee and 6 hours of parking in downtown Toronto.
Hey, imagine being in the hospital for a week for a post-heart-attack evaluation and stenting operation, and the only cost was parking. Or I could have opted for the recommended triple-bypass operation (but I didn’t wanna!) and the cost would have been the same – $0.
As an example of “wait times” and the triage thereof, when I walked into the ER and described my condition to the triage nurse – persistent chest pains – and they took my blood pressure and found that it was way, way too high – things went into action very quickly. It was surprising and a little scary to suddenly be treated as an actual emergency, when I thought maybe I just had indigestion or something.
Again, what happened to this poor woman is very unusual and a stain on the Manitoba health care system. Corrections have hopefully been made, along with some sackings.
Unfortunately, public health systems do not eliminate incompetency in practitioners or administrators. Malpractice scandals occasionally occur in all countries with socialized medicine.
Politicians also love to starve the system of funds in the name of cost efficiency and attempt privatization when the system falters. I don’t know if that is currently the case in Canada, though.
It’s exactly the case in Ontario, and we’re on the eve of re-electing the man that has opened our health care, allowing ‘for profit’ clinics, to ease wait times he created by choking money out of the system.
Canadians like to think they’re smarter than our American cousins. Tomorrow Ford, later PP, we’re every bit as stupid, it would seem to me.
There are two parties in US, which one do you think most closely aligns with Republicans? Next Premier of Ontario, and PM of Canada. Ugh.
This is obviously an unusual case. People do wait months for joint replacement, and they don’t generally get them unless having substantial pain. Some people are more difficult to operate on than others because of chronic health conditions or other factors. I could not say if some of these were concerns here. A small percentage of surgeries have complications, and some prostheses have more problems than others.
No reason to doubt what is said. But no reason to think this is in any way typical either.