1903 replies to this topic

[Barrrister]

Alleye: Wishing you a speedy recovery. Might want to consider watching "Airplane" to take your mind off things.

[Mike K.]

Day three was spent in Imaging for two hours this morning while they scanned the major venous and arterial system from the thighs on down to the heels, mainly the femoral arterial and related branches. I must say when the system finally gets it in gear it is refreshingly and gratifyingly thorough; then it was off to the OPAT unit yet another blast of antibiotics. I'll go back for one more blitzkrieg of drugs tomorrow morning then the doctors will pause to assess the results + review whatever the imaging tells them.

You need to have a word with the so-called doctor who told you to take a hike when you came to him with this problem however long ago.

[AllseeingEye]

You need to have a word with the so-called doctor who told you to take a hike when you came to him with this problem however long ago.

 

To be fair he is a GP and not specialist in infectious conditions; if I learned one thing over the last 12-18 months its that there is no such thing as "the" GP/Emerg/Specialist doctor - all will offer up their best assessment to the best of their ability based on their background and areas of expertise; even within the last three visits to Emerg in the last two weeks three different doctors all offered up varying opinions of the underlying issue that caused my condition.

 

The first was completely wrong, which resulted in a prescription for an antibiotic that did nothing to alleviate the condition basically prolonging it by a week; the second doctor was also not correct but was at least getting warmer and the third emerg doctor finally nailed it about 98% with a very cursory, very fast visual because she's encountered my exact condition previously. She happened to be the right doctor at the right time and was excellent.

 

Her assessment was verified two days by the specialist I am seeing now. Which is why I said off the start to be your own advocate and not to be afraid to push the system when you feel strongly that your particular situation has not been adequately or correctly addressed. Even doctors are human, they are not gods and nor we should expect them to be.

 

As of today it was determined that my thyroid function is good, and no underlying issues were found in the venous arterial scans but three more IV drug blasts are upcoming starting tomorrow. Surgery is "highly likely" in about 6-12 months to flush out, clean up an repair some venous/arterial/issue damage in the lower leg. It would be sooner if not for the covid backlogs in the system.

 

All in all I'm more than satisfied. And I can't  say enough good things about our medical/care staff. They're all champs....

[JohnN]

Couple of CBC health-related news stories today: 

How the American health system is holding up compared with ours

Ready or not, a new debate about the future of health care has begun

[On the Level]

^ They pay the same in tax, but then they add insurance.  We would be in better shape if we too had every family paying $400 to $1,500 a month into health care on top of taxation (my insurance was $600 every 2 weeks when I lived in the US).  Most employers end up paying those fees, but they are substantial with someone needing to pay.  What Canadians want is US care at a free Canadian price.

[Mike K.]

Canadians think our healthcare system is better. I think that’s part of the problem, is we’re not aware how we realistically stack up against the US.

[On the Level]

Canadians think our healthcare system is better. I think that’s part of the problem, is we’re not aware how we realistically stack up against the US.

 

No healthcare system is perfect, but I found the US system as a nightmare.  The amount of paperwork, the 10% or higher co-pay, and so much is just not covered.  It is a real struggle and generates a tremendous amount of worry should you even need to use it.  My insurance rejected my infant son's care and there was little if anything I could do about it.

[spanky123]

^ Depends on the coverage you have and/or your ability to pay. I haven't heard of any Americans travelling to Canada to pay for treatment whilst I know lots of Canadians who have travelled to the US!

[spanky123]

Canadians think our healthcare system is better. I think that’s part of the problem, is we’re not aware how we realistically stack up against the US.

 

Which is because few politicians or the media have any interest in opening up that debate. Then again, most media celebrities and politicians have a 'family' doctor and get whatever treatment they want whenever they think they need it.

 

If you or I need a knee replacement it will probably take you 2-3 years by the time you get a referral to a specialist, gets the necessary imaging done and get time allocated for surgery at a hospital. Meanwhile, a basketball player or politician who injures their knee can get surgery in a week. To me our priorities are bonkers. 

Edited by spanky123, 09 January 2022 - 12:11 PM.

[Mike K.]

It’s all about the insurance coverage, it sounds like. Not all insurance plans are equal, and we experience that here as well with different plans for additional health coverage, but down south when they tell you the gold or platinum plans are the ones to have they’re not kidding.

I mean the reality is healthcare is extremely expensive, and under a socialized system with no real limits on access we get what we get. People like ASE have stories of being pushed around until their conditions turns unbearable and the system has to go into overdrive to keep his health from getting worse.

[A Girl is No one]

Canadians think our healthcare system is better. I think that’s part of the problem, is we’re not aware how we realistically stack up against the US.

Until they have to use it!

[A Girl is No one]

^ Depends on the coverage you have and/or your ability to pay. I haven't heard of any Americans travelling to Canada to pay for treatment whilst I know lots of Canadians who have travelled to the US!

They go to Mexico.
And until not that long ago, some Americans would come up to Canada and use a friends card to get free ´medical services.. of course they didn’t advertise that. I don’t think that’s possible anymore (I hope not).

[Victoria Watcher]

I's odd people think noting of paying $122k for that new electric pick-up truck.  But recoil in horror about maybe paying $5,000 for some quality medical work so they can avoid leg amputation.

[Victoria Watcher]

They go to Mexico.
And until not that long ago, some Americans would come up to Canada and use a friends card to get free ´medical services.. of course they didn’t advertise that. I don’t think that’s possible anymore (I hope not).

 

People come here to have babies for free.  PLUS they get a Canadian kid with passport as a bonus.

 

 

 

 

Richmond’s birth tourism hubs untouchable: MLA

 

There’s not much that can be done when it comes to businesses linked to birth tourism, according to Richmond-Queensborough MLA Jas Johal – particularly if those companies have all their paperwork in place.

 

A maternity and baby store, located at 8171 Ackroyd Road, is listed as the Canadian address for a China-based company, which is dedicated to helping pregnant women give birth overseas.

 

The store also operates a confinement centre, according to the website of parent company Mei Ya Jia Bao – translated by the Richmond News – established in Richmond in 2015.

 

That parent company, which lists its headquarters in Beijing, also operates Canada World Overseas Investment Consulting Inc., and Colombian International Travel Ltd., which provide travel and visa application services.

 

Incorporation certificates for all three companies, issued by the provincial government, are posted on Mei Ya Jia Bao’s website. Meanwhile, the website and service agreements are only in Chinese.

The website states the company has successfully helped more than 6,000 families in China travel to Canada to give birth, and offers service packages that include visa applications and confinement centre care.

 

https://www.richmond...ble-mla-3121712

 

 

 

Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver is also fast turning into a hub for birth citizenship, experiencing a 38 per cent rise in births by non-resident women, one in seven of the total.

 

Virtually no country outside North and South America provides citizenship to babies solely because they’re born on their soil.

 

The newly released figures show there were 4,400 births in Canada in the past year to non-resident mothers, an overall hike of seven per cent. Ontario doctors still preside over the most non-resident births, 3,109, with one hospital in Toronto, Humber River, having a sudden jump of more than 119 per cent.

_______________

 

Ads aimed at women in China who want to have babies in Canada tout luxurious accommodation, birthright citizenship in the “world’s most livable country,” 12 years of free public education, university fees just 10 per cent of those paid by foreign students, free health care and eventual family reunification for the parents of the baby who obtains the passport.

 

https://vancouversun...per-cent-in-b-c

 

 

 

 

 

 

Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, France, Germany and South Africa have all altered their citizenship laws to discourage birth tourism.

 

“Canada is one of a few countries that grants citizenship automatically to anyone born in this country,” said Johal. “Where are people going to go if they can’t go to the United States? The number-one place is Canada.”

 

https://vancouversun...abies-in-canada

Edited by Victoria Watcher, 09 January 2022 - 01:30 PM.

[spanky123]

They go to Mexico.
And until not that long ago, some Americans would come up to Canada and use a friends card to get free ´medical services.. of course they didn’t advertise that. I don’t think that’s possible anymore (I hope not).

 

Not possible anymore. That is why carecards moved to DL's (with a photo). In addition, medical records are available to physicians and they would pick up pretty quickly that someone was not like previous records!

[Mike K.]

I recently renewed my DL and my care card is not associated to it. I think it’s still a choice?

[LJ]

• U.S. free-market system has more surge capacity than Canada’s
• Omicron exposes a trade-off of government-run health care

Thu Jan 6, 2022 - Bloomberg News
By Brian Platt and Kevin Orland

  Quote

“America’s outcomes are almost inexplicable given the scientific and medical firepower of the USA,”

As omicron sweeps through North America, the U.S. and Canadian responses couldn’t be more different. U.S. states are largely open for business, while Canada’s biggest provinces are shutting down. 

The difference largely comes down to arithmetic: The U.S. health care system, which prioritizes free markets, provides more hospital beds per capita than the government-dominated Canadian system does.

“I’m not advocating for that American market-driven system,” said Bob Bell, a physician who ran Ontario’s health bureaucracy from 2014 to 2018 and oversaw Toronto’s University Health Network before that. “But I am saying that in Canada, we have restricted hospital capacity excessively.”

The consequences of that are being felt throughout the economy. In Ontario, restaurants, concert halls and gyms are closed while Quebec has a 10 p.m. curfew and banned in-person church services. British Columbia has suspended indoor weddings and funeral receptions.

The limits on hospital capacity include intensive care units. The U.S. has one staffed ICU bed per 4,100 people, based on data from thousands of hospitals reporting to the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. Ontario has one ICU bed for about every 6,000 residents, based on provincial government figures and the latest population estimates.

Of course, hospital capacity is only one way to measure the success of a health system. Overall, Canadians have better access to health care, live longer than Americans and rarely go bankrupt because of medical bills. Canada’s mortality rate from Covid-19 is a third of the U.S. rate, a reflection of Canada’s more widespread use of health restrictions and its collectivist approach to health care.

Still, the pandemic has exposed one trade-off that Canada makes with its universal system: Its hospitals are less capable of handling a surge of patients. 

The situation is especially stark in Ontario. Nationally, Canada has less hospital capacity than the U.S. has, as a proportion of the population. But even among Canadian provinces, Ontario fares the worst. It had one intensive-care or acute-care bed for every 800 residents as of April 2019, the latest period for which data is available, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. During the same period, the average ratio in the rest of Canada was about one bed for every 570 residents. (The state of New York has about one inpatient hospital bed per 420 residents.) 

That leaves the province’s health care system in a precarious position whenever a new wave of Covid-19 arrives.

“The math isn’t on our side,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Monday as he announced new school and business closures this week to alleviate pressure on the province’s hospitals. The province has nearly 2,300 people hospitalized with Covid-19.

No Surge Capacity

On Wednesday, after Brampton Civic Hospital in the Toronto suburbs declared an emergency because of a shortage of beds and workers, Brampton’s mayor, Patrick Brown, tweeted: “We need a national conversation on inadequate health care capacity and staffing.”

The biggest bottleneck in the system is the staffing required by acute care, particularly in the emergency departments and intensive care units, Bell said. The personnel crunch becomes extreme during Covid waves when large numbers of staff are forced to isolate at home because of infection or exposure.

“We haven’t done an adequate job of developing capacity that will serve the needs of Ontarians,” Bell said. “There’s just no surge capacity available.”

Stephen Archer, head of the medicine department at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, about three hours east of Toronto, spent two decades working in hospitals in Minneapolis and Chicago. He said he believes strongly that the Canadian system is better and provides more equitable care.

Still, he called it “embarrassing” to see Toronto’s hospitals having to transfer virus patients to smaller hospitals around the province, as happened last year. The Kingston Health Sciences Center, where he works, took in more than 100 Covid patients from Toronto earlier in the pandemic, which was no surprise, Archer said, because Ontario’s hospitals get overwhelmed even by a busy flu season.

“I think a very fair criticism of the Canadian system and the Ontario system is we try to run our hospitals too close to capacity,” he said. “We couldn’t handle mild seasonal diseases like influenza, and therefore we were poorly positioned to handle Covid-19.”

Beyond hospital capacity, Archer and Bell cited other reasons for the disparity in the way that the U.S. and Canada respond to new outbreaks. Canadians put more trust in their government to act for the larger collective good, and they won’t tolerate the level of death and severe disease that America has endured from Covid, they said. 

David Naylor, a physician and former University of Toronto president who led a federal review into Canada’s response to the 2003 SARS epidemic, said hospital capacity probably plays a bigger role in Canadian decision-making than in the U.S. because Canada’s universal system means “the welfare of the entire population is affected if health care capacity is destabilized.”

But he also argued that focusing only on hospital capacity could be misleading. “Both Canada and the U.S. have lower capacity than many European countries,” he wrote by email.

The major difference between the two countries’ responses to Covid outbreaks is cultural, Naylor argues. In Canada, more than the U.S., policy is guided by a “collectivist ethos” that tolerates prolonged shutdowns and other public health restrictions to keep hospitals from collapsing.

“America’s outcomes are almost inexplicable given the scientific and medical firepower of the USA,” Naylor said. “With regret, I’d have to say that America’s radical under-performance in protecting its citizens from viral disease and death is a symptom of a deeper-seated political malaise in their federation.”

[Mike K.]

“I’m not advocating for that American market-driven system,” said Bob Bell, a physician who ran Ontario’s health bureaucracy from 2014 to 2018 and oversaw Toronto’s University Health Network before that. “But I am saying that in Canada, we have restricted hospital capacity excessively.”

“I’m not saying their better system is better, or our substandard system is substandard.”

[AllseeingEye]

It’s all about the insurance coverage, it sounds like. Not all insurance plans are equal, and we experience that here as well with different plans for additional health coverage, but down south when they tell you the gold or platinum plans are the ones to have they’re not kidding.

I mean the reality is healthcare is extremely expensive, and under a socialized system with no real limits on access we get what we get. People like ASE have stories of being pushed around until their conditions turns unbearable and the system has to go into overdrive to keep his health from getting worse.

 

Kinda hard to push me around due to my size it is/was more a case - iMO - of a system that first and foremost is buckling under the unprecedented strains of a pandemic which means huge volumes of patients coming in the front door with only minimal admin/admitting/Emerg staff on the other end to deal with them.

 

Toss in bucket-loads of stress on behalf of both the medical staff + patients and you get a recipe for an imperfect patient experience which frankly as in my case resulted in an incomplete or incorrect initial diagnosis of my situation. Twice in fact, and it actually required a third visit to RJH to finally very fortunately get assessed by a physician who 1) knew on sight instantly what was going on with me and 2) who even more critically expedited a previously booked appointment with the key RJH group who (are still) currently treating my condition. This is the OPAT (Outpatient Antimicrobial Therapy) clinic which is exactly the right team with the right expertise to treat my situation.

 

Believe me on the last of 3 visits to Emerg I made it quite plain to the ambulatory staff that I wasn't going anywhere until we either had some answers or an action plan to deal with my situation. And you can do that as long as you are calm, non threatening and not behaving like an entitled ass-hat. But it was a very bumpy, and initially hit and miss road to get there.

 

Not surprisingly the questions Emerg/triage are concerned with above all are:

 

1. Is he dying or experiencing a life threatening situation? No ->

 

     2. Does he have chest pains? No ->

 

          3. Does he have covid, covid-like symptoms or did he other answer YES to any of the Covid protocol questions? No - >

 

.....none of 1, 2 or 3 applies to you? In that case take a seat dude we'll be with you when we can. And if you're lucky you will be spared what happened to me above. Average Emerg wait time for those not experiencing any of the above conditions is about 3-4 hours currently. Last week it was closer to 6 hours on my last visit. 

[Matt R.]

Have I told of the time I burnt my eyeball and didn’t think much of it until I arrived at a very much full RJH ER on a weekend night and bumped everyone else waiting? It got real, fast.

Or the time I was waiting and the group on the bench behind me were crapping bricks because they did the “replace the visine with crazy glue” thing, but for real? Wow.

My colonoscopy has been pushed back due to staffing shortages here, not by much and it’s not early morning so that’s good.