By Chelsey St-Pierre
The Suburban
A study by the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) that was published recently revealed shocking numbers of patients who walked out of emergency rooms (ER) without receiving medical care due to lengthy wait times.
According to the study’s findings, over a period of approximately 11 months in 2023-2024, 3.2 million patients visited Quebec’s emergency departments, and 11.5 per cent of them, or 376,460 people, left before receiving medical attention.
“This is a tragic commentary on our healthcare system. Many patients either don’t have a family doctor or have tried to go to a clinic, so this often is their last resort. Most people with benign conditions will not wait 12, 14, 16 hours or more to be seen by an emergency room physician. We need to track these patients to know what their conditions were. Did they find care elsewhere? Did they get worse? Did their condition improve?” Dr. Paul Saba, a family physician operating in Lachine, said to The Suburban.
According to the Quebec Statistics Institute (ISQ), 26.7 per cent of Quebecers did not have a primary care physician in 2023. This number had gone up by nearly nine per cent since 2019. “We cannot operate adequately with a healthcare system where nearly thirty percent of the population has no family doctor along with a lack of hospital care capacity. These two issues coupled together can lead to increased deaths that could have been avoided otherwise,” Saba explained. “We need to increase the numbers of family doctors in the community and emergency room doctors in the hospitals.”
When asked how these issues could be improved, Dr. Saba stated that “doctors need improved working conditions to be encouraged to stay in the province and avoid too many of them switching to the private sector. Another option is to slow down the retirement of family doctors by giving them incentives. We need to continue to increase class sizes in medical schools and prioritize family medicine. For hospitals and ER’s specifically, to welcome more doctors — we need to train more nurses. They too need to be incentivized to choose and choose to remain in the profession with adequate pay and healthy working conditions.” n