As more patients leave the ER without being treated, it’s time to look at how independent hospitals and clinics can help fill the void.
Access to care is not just a matter of cost; it’s also a matter of time.
If you really don’t feel well and you have to wait five, eight or 12 hours before seeing a doctor, can we truly say that you have access to health care?
It’s understandable that faced with such a long wait, some patients get discouraged and leave emergency rooms untreated.
This is a huge number, but what’s more worrisome still is the fact that it’s growing.
More alarming still is the categories of cases of those leaving our emergency rooms before being treated.
The Quebec health-care system sorts cases on a scale of decreasing priority from one to five. A priority five case (or P5) is considered non-urgent. This doesn’t mean there’s no health problem, but rather that the case can wait a certain amount of time with no major risk. In the middle of the scale, a priority three case (P3) is considered urgent, while a priority one case (P1) is a case that requires resuscitation and must be treated as soon as possible.
In terms of access to care, the diagnosis couldn’t be clearer: The patient is ailing with a deteriorating condition and left emergency.
Some will say it’s just a matter of funding, that our government-run health-care system would be a well-oiled machine if we would just inject a few billion dollars more.
But we’ve been giving the health-care system more and more resources for years without seeing any notable improvement in the timeliness of our access to care.
To get a sense of what this represents, if we took all the personal provincial income taxes paid last year by Quebecers and added to this all the provincial income taxes paid by Quebec companies, we would still be short $5.6 billion to cover the health-care system’s funding.
And despite the additional $2.5 billion the government plans to dump into it this year, it’s a safe bet the situation will not improve substantially. The reason, we argue, is that it’s not so much a resource problem as it is an organizational problem.
Quebec, and the rest of Canada’s provinces, are not the only jurisdictions with universal health care, accessible to one and all. We are, however, among the only ones to insist on having the facilities that deliver this care be administered by government employees.
For too long, we’ve tried to fix an organizational problem by throwing more and more money at it. It’s time for Quebec to change tack, and let independent clinics and hospitals improve Quebecers’ access to care.
Emmanuelle B. Faubert is an economist at the Montreal Economic Institute.