A new poll says long wait times lead half of Canadians to avoid seeing a doctor or going to the hospital.
The poll was conducted by Léger and commissioned by right-leaning think-tanks the Montreal Economic Institute, SecondStreet.org, and the Canadian Constitution Foundation.
The percentage of respondents who say they avoid consulting doctors because of wait times is highest among women, people over 55 and Quebecers.
Or, alternatively, you’ve scheduled an appointment with your doctor and he said he can see you in two weeks. Hopefully it doesn’t get worse before then. And if you don’t have a doctor, sucks to be you I guess.
A health problem is either an emergency or it is not an emergency. If it’s not, you can wait the two weeks.
If it is, you shouldn’t be making an appointment anyway, you should be seeking immediate help.
If you think it’s an emergency, and a medical professional tells you it’ll be X amount of time before you can see a doctor, that means you’ve been triaged and it may not be as much of an emergency as you think it is.
Or it may be more of an emergency than they think it is.
Tragedies can happen, yes. In a perfect world, we would have enough medical manpower to see everyone immediately, every time, all the time. We don’t live in that world. The article is particularly interesting given the original context of the post here. Should that person not have gone at all? They’d still have died.
Based on the article we’re discussing, I wouldn’t have blamed them if they didn’t. And if they didn’t, someone would have almost certainly assumed it must not have been a real emergency then. Someone else commented in this thread about sitting in the ER for 7 hours with chest pains. Fortunately in that person’s case it was not a heart attack, but in both cases it was “not an emergency”. That’s the problem. Not having a family doctor adds to that problem, but that’s the problem.