Canada’s healthcare system is teetering on the brink of crisis and governments must act swiftly to avoid a full-blown meltdown, according to a growing chorus of top doctors and medical leaders.
What happened: Canadian Medical Association president Katharine Smart told federal officials that long backlogs for basic medical procedures and shortages of doctors and nurses have pushed the healthcare system to the brink.
- In some parts of the country, emergency rooms are closing for weeks at a time due to a lack of nurses and doctors, while in others they’re so packed that doctors are treating patients in hospital parking lots.
- Patients in Ontario now wait an average of 20 hours in emergency rooms before getting a bed in the hospital, the longest wait time ever posted. We recommend packing some light reading for your next ER visit, maybe War & Peace?
Why it’s happening: Like that stuff at the back of your fridge you’ve avoided looking at for six months, Canada’s healthcare troubles have been festering for many years—the pandemic just made existing issues impossible to ignore.
One of the biggest problems? A shortage of nurses and doctors that’s created a vicious cycle of burnout and turnover: not enough workers means worse conditions in hospitals, which makes even more workers leave for greener pastures, which leads to even worse conditions.
- Job vacancies in healthcare increased by more than 90% in the first quarter of 2022 from the previous year and accounted for 15% of all openings in the country—the highest share of any sector, according to Statistics Canada data.
What’s next: Without urgent intervention by governments to boost capacity in the system, Dr. Smart believes problems in healthcare will go from bad to worse: “What's clearly coming is the collapse of the current healthcare system,” she told CTV News last week.
.gif)
