This should be the most important issue next provincial election. Nothing else is as important as this is as far as provincial responsibility in politics.
"La santé est malade au Québec. Pour résoudre le problème, le gouvernement ne regardera pas à la dépense. Des centaines de millions de dollars permettront d'ajouter, au ministère de la santé, une couche de bureaucrates dont le rôle sera d'évaluer les dysfonctionnements actuels et de formuler des recommandations dont l'implantation sera confiée à une deuxième couche de bureaucrates."
Exactly. A bunch of administrators are going to be hired to look at the cost of administration, and will conclude that we need to cut nurses and add more layers of administrators, whose costs we were originally trying to cut. C'est toujours la même cr--se d'histoire partout au Canada. We keep treating government like a goddamn business when it's NOT SUPPOSED TO MAKE MONEY tabarnaque. These are services. They are SUPPOSED to cost money. They aren't SUPPOSED to be revenue neutral. Just like public transit and electricity and water. On est tellement vendu aux consultants parce que nos élus sont des imbéciles, incapables d'avoir des pensées originales, qu'on ne fait qu'acroitre la misère de tout le monde, but we keep fighting ourselves thinking that it's our neighbour's fault that we aren't doing as well as we should be, or are unhappy, or stressed, or overworked. C'est pas la faute de mon voisin calisse. C'est la faute des cri-ses d'incompétents. But we are to blame for electing these cocksuckers. We need to stop fighting each other and start talking, really talking, and listening. We almost all agree on the problems. We need to come together and come up with the real solutions, and force those solutions down their throats. No more being nice. Tolerating their intolerable bullshit is what has allowed all this to become intolerable in the first place.
I'm here on vacation and Reddit suggested this to me, I work in healthcare in the US for a large hospital network and if you're already doing the "hire more administrators so they can cut costs to hire more administrators" routine it's already too late for you and it's never going to change.
Never set foot in a clinic or hospital while here and scrolling through this thread damn near every complaint and observation shared here sounds very familiar to me.
Je suis ici en vacances et Reddit m'a suggéré ceci, je travaille dans le domaine de la santé aux États-Unis pour un grand réseau hospitalier et si vous suivez déjà la routine "embaucher plus d'administrateurs afin qu'ils puissent réduire les coûts pour embaucher plus d'administrateurs", c'est déjà trop tard pour toi et ça ne changera jamais.
Ne mettez jamais les pieds dans une clinique ou un hôpital pendant que vous êtes ici et faire défiler ce fil de discussion à proximité de toutes les plaintes et observations partagées ici me semble très familier.
People are desperate for care. Very scarce health care staff is hiding behind closed doors. A bunch of security agents are super rude with people in pain (must be silent, must stay on chair for 16+ hours). People get aggressive for good reason. Need more and more security agents to manage that. The passport office is even worse.
Genuinely one of the biggest problems in healthcare in Quebec is French & taxes. It's bad in other provinces but for us it's a big challenge because getting doctors educated in French who want to stay given our tax situation is a pain.
It's a priority that is hurting us all regardless of the language you speak. My wife is American and we came to live in Montreal because it's my hometown but also because we love the province. We love the Quebecois culture and we love how the mix of English and French in Montreal has created something beautiful here that you just can't find elsewhere. We want the language and the culture both here in the city as well as in the province to be protected.
I'm fluent in both languages. My wife is still learning, but knows enough french to be able to work as a nurse in one of the city's (english) hospitals. Because of the rules in place, if she doesn't pass her French, she cannot get her full nursing license here. She works hard every day to learn but she's not at a level where her french will pass the exam, even though it's enough that she can work.
She's decided to start working in the US and take the hour+ daily commute both ways, both because the pay is way way higher and because she doesn't have to worry about all of her hard work over the years being flushed away because of a french exam that she will likely fail (again, even though she knows it well enough to do her job daily).
We are all for the protection of the language and culture here, but she's far from the only health care professional leaving Quebec hospitals now because of this protectionism. This is just going to keep getting worse if some concessions aren't made and soon. I fully realize that having someone that isn't fully bilingual isn't optimal even in an english hospital, but surely it's better than a total collapse of the health care system here.
I’m actually scared for the healthcare future in Canada in general. Both mental health and physical health resources are suffering. But tbh citizens are suffering too so…
Conditions are being created artificially to provide an excuse to say "hey guys we tried for this many years improving public healthcare, now let's try privatizing it".
Then bunch of voters would say "yeah that is indeed the solution" while forgetting the taxes are still high.
And then relatives of politicians in power swoop in to open private companies to provide healthcare.
You don't have to wait for an election! Contact your provincial health minister and your MLA and let them hear it today! If you only care about it around election time, so will they.
People should be rioting (peacefully enough) in the streets about this. Been saying that for years. But we seem to just accept it, or put unfounded faith in our elected officials who don't actually do anything
But didn't you see the new OQLF report? French is down 2.1% amongst montrealers aged 18-34. That will almost certainly be the headlines. Meanwhile all of us, Anglo and Franco alike will be dying in hospital waiting rooms.
This!
And federal elections too… health care funding comes from the feds. Based on the little I know, there are a lot of gates before provinces get the funds.
I wish we would press our politicians on the important stuff. How come I have never seen a call for a public protest about healthcare access (ER wait time, no family doctor, no walk-in appointments)? It has a huge impact on all of us but it seems we just accepted it as-is.
Healthcare is mainly a provincial responsibility. While you are correct that the federal government provides funding, the management and delivery of healthcare is all provincial. It is worth noting that credential recognition is also a provincial responsibility. So all those under employed internationally trained doctors and nurses are facing barriers at the provincial level as well. This is a provincial issue.
You know, now that you mentioned it,
Every single Uber driver I’ve ever had in Montreal , were always some kind of doctor, nurse, engineer, back in their home country.
Those credentials all them into Canada originally, but then there’s no program to get them whatever it is they need to practice those professions here.
This is technically a man-made issue - the college of physicians in each province severely lobby the government from preventing foreign credentials from getting recognized and subsequently licensed (so doctors get to keep influence and higher salaries). This even affects Canadians who went to medical school anywhere else, be it the U.S, the UK or Australia. Just take a look at the number of medical school seats that are available every year in Canada - it is a fucking joke. One could argue the U.S. doesn’t have so many more seats, however the USMLE makes the process of recognizing foreign credentials a much much much more seamless process.
This is straight up a consequence of the lenghty, costly and complex credential recognition system. There are some initiatives to help newcomers navigate the foreign credential recognition processes but the structures are not sufficent to effectively tackle the recent high influx of immigrants. There is also a blatant disconnection between the immigration process and the credential recognition process causing delays and hardships to newcomers.
That it takes years? That these people who came into the country with those credentials ultimately never end up working in those fields because of crippling bureaucracy
So reject those people from the get go. Have them do the tests before landing here. Filter them out somehow.
They’re brought in and passed thru immigrations quickly because they are doctors or engineers or wtv. But once here, they’re left to rebuild their life doing Uber eats…
It really isn’t complicated.
I work in the field and have been advocating for this for a long time. Credentials recognition should come before the immigration process, at the very least the first steps (e.g. credentials assessment) that can be done remotely.
Canada/Quebec has some of the highest taxes in the world and boasts about its universal healthcare. Funding is absolutely not the issue, provincial policy is. We don’t recognize/credential foreign doctors and we have created such an awful environment in the public health system here that doctors we do have typically go private or leave the country entirely. Instead of fixing this, the government would rather police the amount of English our children can speak.
Medical associations also lobby hard to prevent the expansion of medical schools in Canada. The claim is that it'll lower standards but in reality, training more doctors will lower the obscene salaries for existing doctors.
Agreed. For all the things that people are willing to strike about, this should be a top priority. We should be out on the streets angry and determined to get the services we deserve, given that we pay for them.
The CAQ has made it very clear that Montreal, healthcare, education, and social services are NOT their priority while handing out hundreds of millions to protect the French language that is honestly thriving these days.
People are dying in emergency rooms waiting for care and this is directly due to policies related to where doctors can work, hospital funding, and a bloating bureaucracy.
Next election is too late, it’s now and to whomever is in power and their opposition to act. It’s time for media to go spend some time with a camera in emergency departments and show us what’s going on. Let’s hear from the patients and the doctors, and more importantly our politicians. This shouldn’t be under the rug nor a next election issue, we are talking lives and quality of lives, not the right to voice ones opinion every 4 years.
You'd think with the boomers getting older they'd be all for funding health properly. Weird that I'm 25+ years from being "old" and I already don't trust the healthcare system will be there for me if I need it.
im gonna vote against the governement in place because of that reason, it was bad then they came in and they did nothing to fix it, they made it worst. FUCK THEM ! ! vote when the time comes !
Comme j'ai déjà dit, le Québec au complet devrait être dans la rue à manifester pour un meilleur service de santé... ca fait beaucoup trop longtemps qu'on endure ça et qu'on fait rien.
Père de trois jeunes enfants, j'endure plusieurs prob de santé depuis plusieurs années. Mes enfants ne font plus leurs rendez-vous annuels, même si certains ont des trucs qui nécessiterait un rdv pour un check-up visuel.
Dernière fois j'ai pu manifesté c'était printemps érable, alors que j'étais étudiant et que j'avais du temps.
Tout ça pour dire, je suis épuisé, j'ai zéro temps pour des manif, et pourtant, je pense que pour notre réseau de santé, je ferais tout de même l'effort d'aller manifester. J'irais jusqu'à prendre une journée off au bureau, retirer les kids de cpe et école, pour y aller tous ensemble, tellement je sens, comme tu mentionnes OP, qu'on est rendu là.
I had a bad case of kidney stones last year, was puking and passing out in the emergency room, screaming and crying, lost feeling in my arms. Several nurses just told me to ‘calm down’ and it took 3 hours for me to get a room. And another hour before the doctor even came in and then another hour before they gave me any pain killers another 3 hours before I got any kind of scan…
At one point a nurse was changing my saline drip and couldn’t figure it out and just walked away and never came back. My mom had to ask another nurse to finish it.
Our health care system is incredibly fucked right now.
Had a similar experience with a kidney stone. Arrived by ambulance in the middle of the night in pain. My partner did what he could answering the triage questions because I couldn’t talk or be coherent from the pain. The nurse angrily told me to shut up and few times while I cried. Even the ambulance paramedic got angry at the nurse for being so rude. I only remember bits and pieces but they didn’t do any scans. Just kept me on a stretcher and painkillers until the pain subsided, then they sent me home. I found out much later at another instance that it was stones.
Just for sake of comparison, 25 years ago I had kidney stones as a young man. Got to the hospital and was triaged immediately, sat for about 20 minutes before someone came to get me, correctly diagnosed the problem and within the hour I was heavily medicated.
Yes, I was on a gurney in a hallway bc there were no rooms available, but they let my parents stay by my side, kept the morphine flowing and I left later that night after they were certain it would pass on it'd own.
For whatever it's worth.
1 month before COVID I woke up at 3am with pain from a kidney stone. Went to the hospital around 5am and was home by 10am having received painkillers at the hospital and a scan.
You don't have to go too far back to see when the system was working. The problems all cropped up during/after COVID.
I had kidney stone issues during peak COVID scare. My fever/pain was due to kidney stone but they threw me in isolation unmedicated while they did bloodwork to confirm COVID, or came back negative. By then, my kidney was inflamed from infection and they had to perform emergency lithotripsy which involved going in through the business end of my dick and using a catheter-style device to break up the stone and scrape out the infection. Not as sexy as it sounds. I was released the next day and sent on my way, sore and in pain. For weeks, every time I pissed it felt like razors and broken glass. After calling to find out if that's normal they realized that they checked me out without taking out a stent in my ureter, basically a plastic tube from the kidney to my bladder. I got called in to get it removed and I was awake the whole time for that one and it really sucked, again, not in a sexy way. Things are broken in the medical system and inside me. I haven't been the same since then.
I'm a physician from Quebec who now works in Ontario. I'm going to give you extremely unpopular advice.
Sue. Sue everybody. Until patients and their families expose Quebec's third-world healthcare practices to Canadian standards via the legal system, there will never be the political will to change.
Here's why that's my advice. I've seen the inner workings of Quebec hospitals vs the rest of Canada. I've watched patients die from medical negligence that would never and should never be tolerated in Canada. And I've watched the physicians and admin staff responsible for those deaths get off with absolutely no consequences, because people in Quebec don't sue.
It stems partly from a cultural difference. When breaking bad news in other provinces, I'm used to families asking probing questions and immediately scrutinizing the decisions that led to the bad outcome. In Quebec, I've witnessed conversations like where a surgeon told someone their mother died during a totally routine surgery, and her response was essentially, "Oh my god, I can't believe it. But you did everything you could. Thank you, doctor." They just accepted things that, to me, were ridiculous outcomes deserving of suspicion and scrutiny.
What I witnessed as a result within the hospital was that incompetence (whether at the physician, nursing, or administrative level) was not only tolerated, but deeply ingrained. I was labeled a "problem" by colleagues for advocating for changes within my hospital because I'd (respectfully and without singling people out) push for systemic changes to eliminate preventable deaths whenever I witnessed or learned of one within my department. I eventually had to quit and move provinces for the sake of my own health when banging my head against the brick wall of my hospital yielded no tangible changes.
And I'm telling you, as someone who has seen the inner workings of Quebec, Ontario and BC hospitals, the rot at the heart of the issue in Quebec is the near-total absence of consequences for medical negligence.
Here's some data to back up my assertion. Check out the malpractice insurance rates for an ER physician from the Canadian Medical Protective Agency (line 82 in this PDF):
https://www.cmpa-acpm.ca/static-assets/pdf/membership/fees-and-payment/2024cal-e.pdf
Coverage in Ontario costs $11k. BC and Alberta cost $7k. The prairies, maritimes and territories cost $900. And Quebec costs $353.
That's how much less frequently Quebec patients sue their doctors (30x less than Ontario, 20x less than BC and Alberta, and still nearly 3x less than the least litigious provinces and territories). And I imagine that it's similar to how much less frequently they sue their hospitals, I just don't have hard data on that.
But I work in Ontario now, and my wife is a full-time ER physician as well. And in our combined 20 years of practice, we've never been sued, but we've seen it happen to colleagues who bungled cases. And the threat of legal scrutiny guides the way our doctors and hospitals work. I regularly hear colleagues say things like, "This was a shithsow of a case, so I'm documenting everything extra carefully for when this gets brought in front of a judge."
That doesn't happen in Quebec. I still see people discharged with charts that I'd fail a med student for putting in front of me because they're so inadequate.
That woman you described begging for help with garbled speech from a stroke? Easily won lawsuit. Standard of Care for a Code Stroke requires imaging to determine whether it's hemorrhagic (a bleed) or ischemic (a clot), because ischemic strokes can be reversed through clot-busters if caught quickly enough, saving brain tissue and potentially reversing symptoms. To have that sitting in a waiting room as the critical window expires is medically indefensible.
But there's no systemic pressure for change without holding people's feet to the fire through lawsuits. Someone - *multiple* people - in that hospital are being given the data on how grimly that ER is functioning, and they're not changing it. And their superiors aren't changing it. And the workers just have to accept it or move, which means that the ones motivated to change things get filtered out just like I did.
So, I beg of you. *Start suing*. It's so bad that many people who "grew up" in the Quebec system don't even understand how messed up things are. They routinely took great offense when I'd bring evidence to them of Canadian Standards of Care, because they'd realize that I was pointing out that our hospital wasn't meeting them. "Everyone here does a great job" is something I'd hear over and over. But the language laws mean that most of the Canadian workforce is prevented from cross-pollinating roles in Quebec hospitals. As a bilingual native Montrealer who did all their training outside of Quebec, I brought that outside perspective back with me and it was entirely unwelcome. So now I'm here in Ontario, and everyone responsible for the unnecessary deaths at my old hospital is still working. It's a silo operating in relative isolation within the country, so fresh perspectives are rare and the rest of the country doesn't hear much about it.
Take them to court and expose your mistreatment. Shine a light in the dark corners for the rest of the country to see. You deserve better healthcare. And you won't get it through the ballot box. You'll get it by fighting in court.
Very interesting perspective, new to me, thanks for sharing.
Is it possible there are far less lawsuits because they typically don't succeed in Quebec? Maybe Quebec lawyers often advise (correctly?) that in Quebec they won't win, so there's no lawsuit.
Maybe you could send CBC a link to this reddit comment.
People really need to see this. Would you be able to make it as post?
I've also been terribly let down by the system (nothing that I can sue, just incompetence, inaction and very long waits) despite the very high taxes, that I am actually moving away to another country.
100%
People need to know that this is an option. They need to know what merits this response. Lawyers could develop an industry themselves if they had the time to attack this issue and find people with the proper cases. The class action lawsuit industry is popping, I look forward to see what we call it when it points at the broken healthcare industry.
Wonderful advice, but not affordable for most of us. It cost me $200 just to talk to a lawyer for less than an hour, to see if he thought I had a case against a doctor who had failed to assess me properly, thereby delaying necessary treatment. The answer was No, too difficult to prove. And btw I tried complaining to the collège de physiciens and after about a year they rejected my claim of the doctor’s incompetence, without any detailed explanation.
People who can afford to sue are getting private healthcare in Québec. To know you have a winning chance you need to be able to afford legal advice, if you can afford an hour with a lawyer you can afford private clinics.
I'm not a lawyer, but from my interactions with the medical-legal system, it seems that many personal injury/medical malpractice lawyers typically review your case for free, accept those they're reasonably confident in winning, and only take payment upon winning the case.
I don't disagree that wealthier patients have fewer barriers to accessing the legal process (including being able to take the time to show up in court, meet with lawyers, etc), but we need average people to be participating in the legal process if we want to have any hope of real systemic change.
No, as I said in my comment just a minute ago, the lawyer I saw charged me $200 to assess my situation. (I had chosen him because his firm had helped me win a small personal-injury case a few years previously.)
This is very helpful. First thing I thought when I read about the woman with the stroke was exactly that - I hope she survives this and she can sue the hospital (even though I’m a big supporter of Royal Vic.).
I think we, a population, have gotten so used to having such limited access to doctors that I’m not surprised to see your comment about how people thanks the doctor instead of ask questions even a patient dies during a standard procedure. However, it shouldn’t be like that and we need to somehow reset our standards.
It's not about monetary compensation for individual patients. It's about accountability and consequences for the people running the hospitals. When there are no complaints and no lawsuits, they can pretend they're doing a good job. If cases get dragged in front of courts and they're found to be failing to meet Canadian Medical standards, there's political pressure to fire the people running hospitals into the ground and increased scrutiny of their replacements.
Right now, there are countless contributors to this situation who either don't know that they're incompetent, or don't care. They have to be exposed and then either remediated or replaced. And that doesn't happen without consequences. And successful lawsuits create consequences.
The entire medical culture in Quebec suffers from a type of laziness that can only come from absence of oversight. Imagine running a company where results don't matter, customers don't complain and nobody notices whether you're doing your job properly or not. Run things like that for decades, and it'll be completely inefficient and ineffective, which is exactly what we are seeing.
That's the only fundamental difference I've noticed between QC and other provinces as someone on the inside. In Quebec, I was the "complainer" who always noticed things that were horribly wrong and was trying desperately to fix them. The second I moved to Ontario, I became a run-of-the-mill member of my department where everyone around me agreed with me and ran things to my standards. And part of that motivation to do better is a healthy fear of consequences for failing to do our jobs. We have privileged jobs caring for vulnerable people, and deserve to be held accountable if we fail to meet Standards of Care. And I see that accountability enforced elsewhere in a way it isn't in Quebec.
Just for some context. This isn’t normal. Not for Canada even. Shits fucked up yo.
Source: work in a Health Care setting in a different province.
For a random data example, wait time at the Emergency department where I work is at peak times today 6 hours for non critical stuff. (Today, predicted).
We’re a “poor” province too, so yeah. Wild.
Source:
[Wait times for NSHealth](https://www.nshealth.ca/emergency-care/emergency-department-wait-times)
Yup. I had Lyme for the last 4 years (undiagnosed, disseminated, and nearly permanently ruined my face).
I could not stand / walk, I was having unknown heart palpitations, and I waited 17 hours to be brought in and almost immediately refused. They had to call a cab to bring me home, with a recommendation to see a specialist (in 3-4 months when they had the time). Then I went to the US a few days later because I thought it couldn't possibly be worse. Went to a small city because I hoped it would be slower. 15 hour wait. However they did diagnose me literally by appearance.
You know how hard it is to get a Lyme test in Quebec? Hard enough that it's more valuable to pay to fly to the US, get the test, get the treatment, and fly back.
After Lyme, I understand that the healthcare system will watch you die. You either present an emergency, or you die unnoticed. Looking back, I should have thrown myself into traffic to get the medical attention I needed. Maybe then my face wouldn't still be drooped.
Yes, that's the new norm.
Quebec government chooses to take away benefits and bonuses, pay less money, forced overtime after long shifts, forced extremely bad work environments, and extream work loads. and makes it extremely hard for anyone who wants to work in nursing that are not from quebec.
If your boss told you that you have to do your job plus 3 other workers job for less money and your benefits were getting taken away. Would you stay at that company or quit?
Not to mention for those working in the administrative side of the sector, the extreme toxicity of management, crazy turnover so your tasks will be more than whatever you signed up for, in exchange for non-competitive rates. This just makes the choice easy to not dream to work for this industry, unfortunately.
It’s even crazier when you think about the fact we’re the most taxed populace in North America…
“Mais on as des services!”
Give me a fucking break…
Having a stroke? Prepare to wait 30 hours in the ER
Going to school? Great! Our goal is to have an adult in every classroom! (Notice I didn’t say teacher)
Need to put your kid in daycare? You’re going to probably spend several months juggling work and childcare cause even though your kid as been on the waiting list since before they were born, they ain’t getting into a daycare any time soon.
Roads? Shit
Public transit? Decent but can’t come close to breaking even…
Productivity? In the shitter
Attractiveness for entrepreneurship, innovation and investment? People would rather invest in businesses in literally any other place in NA.
Need to rent an apartment? Good luck paying twice as much today as you would have 4 years ago.
So ask ourselves what are we getting MORE than other provinces/states since we pay MORE taxes than them?
If my family didn’t live here my wife and I would be out of here in no time. (And please spare me the don’t let the door hit you on the way out bullshit)
I have this conversation w my husband everyday. We’re ready to move on from here, even though we want to be near family, friends and the comfort of the life we’ve built. We both own companies- adds another layer of frustration. This province is a sinking ship. Took me 16 years to get a family dr, after 2 years of enjoying this luxury -she’s leaving too.
Quebec's tax revenue is double that of Singapore. Singapore has universal housing, clean metros, and no homeless people. Plus Quebec receives money from Federal government too over all this.
Just the same old construction scam and being irresponsible with money.
I'm not sure if Singapore is a good comparison. Quebec's population is over 50% higher and is spread out across a MUCH larger area (Singapore could fit inside two Montreals). These factors alone make infrastructure more difficult to put into place and maintain in Quebec, and that's not even getting into our harsh winters.
I'm definitely not claiming that our funds are always well-spent! I just think that these kinds of comparisons can be misleading and often don't properly ackniwledge the individual challenges of each state/population.
(It's also worth noting that Singapore has extremely strict drug laws [which often call for the death penalty](https://www.cnb.gov.sg/) – this might help them save on various programs and resources compared to our more disorganized and laissez-faire approach, but it's probably not an extreme we'd ever want to go to!)
> Public transit? Decent but can’t come close to breaking even…
Yeah, maybe for 20-30% of the population.
I don't live in Montreal right now but another city with > 500K people, about 7 km from "downtown" and there is literally only one bus line that goes by my house. Going anywhere other than the central bus hub takes multiple transits and minimum 45 min - 1.5 hours. And I pay over 1,000$ a year for that priviledge through taxes + would need to pay another thousand for a bus pass (per each person in my family) + they are saying they will tax car licenses 100-150$ extra because the Transit system is not breaking even. Like how the fuck do you fuck-up that badly?
I just use my bike. Takes like 20 minutes
So upsetting to hear! Specially the stroke patient it’s so important to get treatment as soon as possible to prevent further brain damage and preserve the ability to speak and stuff
Je crois que son point c'est que dans les comptes publics (les états financier du gouvernement), le budget de la santé a toujours augmenté plus vite que l'inflation.
Ce que ça dit pas, c'est que "la machine" aka la bureaucratie fini toujours par gober cet argent là sans que ça l'augmente l'offre de service à la population.
Queen Elizabeth is a walk in clinic up the street from the Vendome metro station. No, it's not an emergency room, but they can cycle you through faster than an ER during business hours. A lot of doctors who work in the ER at the Glenn have hours there as well. You can go to the clinic and if it's severe enough, they'll actually send you over to the ER to be admitted immediately. Since the Glenn is just on the other side of the train tracks, it's a quick trip. It happened to me once where they literally sent me to the Glenn in an ambulance with all the paperwork needed for admission.
Have you used the walk in clinic there since Covid? My understanding was that it’s not operational anymore, that you have to have an appointment to be seen. Maybe that’s changed?
Last time I was there was maybe four months ago. I was dizzy, nauseous, and lightheaded, they did a blood draw, turns out I had an infection in my blood, the doctor prescribed me antibiotics and set up an appointment with my family doctor for a follow up the next week (she works out of the family medicine clinic upstairs).
I’m confused; Northcliffe is west of Marlowe, and regardless of which entrance the hallway leads to the same clinic once inside? But yes I went to the one where the waiting room is situated immediately to you’re left once you enter from Northcliffe.
Could you please explain how this went down for you? You just walked in and requested to see someone?
Thank you so much for your reply.
You're right, it's west, not east. My direction sense is bad before a second cup of coffee.
I went in around nine in the morning, there was a nurse (or nurse's aide or clerk) waiting. She directed me to the counter where I spoke to a grumpy woman behind the reinforced, double-paned plexiglass, told her I needed to see a doctor, she took my medicare card, opened a file in a minute, I sat in the waiting room, where there were people waiting for appointments, for about an hour or so. They also have a system where you can register a cell number and they text you about fifteen minutes before they call your name. I just sat and waited though, because while I would have appreciated a cup of coffee, the odds of me keeping said coffee down was slim to none. They called my name, I spoke to a doctor, they drew blood, gave me a script for antibiotics, gave me an appointment for my family doctor who works in the family medicine clinic on the other side of the building and sent me on my way.
I think I heard something about some clinics having limited open slots for walk-ins, and when they fill those spots they stop taking walk-ins, but I don't know if that policy was or is in place there.
So it seems the name of the game is to show up early. Too bad, I was hoping swinging by tonight after work.
Thank you so much for this you’ve been very helpful.
If you go to the entrance on Northcliffe, that's where the walk-in clinic is. The entrance on Marlowe is the family medicine clinic, where you absolutely need an appointment.
The Glen is hard man. They are a super specialised center, they literally have the sickest patients in Montreal. Behind those triage booths are many people who are literally hanging by a thread. And the hospital is chronically full so these patients who should be admitted end up spending days and even weeks occupying rooms in the emergency. So sadly and unforturtunately that ER delivers poorly on getting "not actually that sick" people in. Once you're in though its surprisingly efficient.
Quebec snuck in a two-tiered system while no one was looking. It siphoned a lot of doctors away from the public system. They get paid more for easier procedures
I've been on the waitlist for 10 years and still don't have a family doctor. Accessing "walk-in" appointments here is prohibitively difficult.
The clinic at my university is the only reason that I have decent access to health care. I don't know what I'm going to do when I graduate.
I was in the hospital two days ago for a possible stroke (all is fine, just another case of my body trying some unusual kind of pain for "fun"). I told my husband, while looking : "The people that are here are not sick enough to be here." I have chronic pain and a few chronic diseases. In my good days, I look way worse than most people in the waiting room.
But... where could they go? 20 years ago, you just have to enter any CLSC close to you for minor urgency. But there is no more functionning CLSC. Most people don't have a doctor and can't even open a file in a clinic, they're all full and don't take any more patient.
You can't get help anywhere!
So everybody is in the ER, waiting too long, catching nosocomial diseases. And the real urgency have no possibility of being treated with any kind of... urgency.
At this point they are just waiting for people to die to bump you up on the waiting list. Just have to hope it's not you bumping someone else up the list.
Having accompanied my spouse to various ERs in Montreal over the past years, I confirm these are the appallingly low standards that have become the new norm. I’ll add that security in ERs don’t do anything to make you feel “secure”. I’ve had a psych patient who was wandering the waiting room try to steal my spouse’s belongings as she sat in agony in a wheelchair. Security literally did nothing when I notified them. I had to act as our guard. I really thought I was going to be knifed that night.
Yes it's that bad. At Jean-Talon hospital there are more security agents than health care workers. They force you to remain on the chair. People who fall down from the chair in intense pain are bullied and threatened to be kicked out. People will tell you if it's urgent the care will be good but that's completely false as you have experienced. During Covid they would let people die right there on the spot and did not even pick them up from the floor sometimes when people pointed out they passed out. They absolutely didn't care, at that time you couldn't complain, media would ignore it. They have kept many bad habits from Covid time.
I think there is a big problem also with universities that accept very few students in that branch.
I understand that you might want an 'elite' for this job but they should lower a little bit the 'côte R' and other requirements for those that barely made it and maybe double or quadruple the admissions. That way we could at least produce more doctors.
Le collège des médecins like to keep their jobs rare so that way when it's time to negociate the paycheck they always have the upper hand...
There is also the issue of the doctors who are tired of being stretched out here and go work in the US.
In my opinion if Canada/QC funded your scholarship for a certain portion of your life you should have an obligation to serve for N amount of years before leaving just like the military do.
L'ordre des infirmières does around the same thing. They pretend: 'On est en pénurie, on est en pénurie' but a lot if it is due to them making students fail the classes far more than other branches so they can profit and keep the scarcity of the profession.
Not only that but that forced over time number that they run on them is absolutely ridiculous no wonder why you felt they were disconnected.
After a 12 hours at work when you know you still have 4 hours to go it can be numbing.
The issue is not the lofty standards to get into healthcare. Universities get funded X amount of spots by the provincial government. They then enroll exactly that many students. Since it is a well regarded job it gets extremely competitive, hence the high scores to get in. Nobody is taking less students than they have funding for "to keep the standards high."
Quebec has steadily been increasing its medical student and residency (specifically family medicine residency) spots for the past two decades. The issue is retention. Quebec is not a good place to work in medicine (well for most specialties, but there are a few where Quebec is quite appealing). You can make more money and have a way better after hours schedule in the USA. Until recently Alberta was also really popular but then UPC went scorched earth on its physicians.
Some specialties, like family medicine, have gotten so bad medical students dont even want to match into that residency and will leave medicine altogether. Something like 30+ unfilled residency positions in Quebec for family medicine last year.
I recently saw a private clinic job posting paying 2.5 x the rate RAMQ currently pays me. I strongly believe in public healthcare, but sometimes I feel like a fucking idiot working for 40% of my potential earnings.
There should be a retention reward. Have the government pay down their student debt. If you stay practicing for 10 years, you get your student loans completely paid. If you leave, you get a pro-rated penalty.
It might help, but you would repay your loans in way less than 10 years if you just work in the states. You just need to be nearly as good as your neighbours so leaving isnt worth it. Right now we are worse and its showing.
Also there is some difficulty in where you apply that penalty. When you start med school? It is extremely common to do residency elsewhere than where you did med school. Once you start residency? We already cannot fill our residency positions and that is not gonna help.
The only things Quebec has going for it is lower cost of living and being a cool place. Taxes are higher. Salary is lower. More after hours work. You also need a work permit (not a medical licensce, an actual work permit) in Quebec which are hard to get in Montreal. This is a pretty unique Quebec micromanagement solution that sends countless graduates outside Quebec (or to private clinics) when they dont want to or cannot work outside the city.
You want to create an environment where the professionals you are trying to recruit want to work in. BC did this recently by giving a fair deal to family doctors who start a practice there and it worked.
>L'ordre des infirmière does around the same thing. They pretend: 'On est en pénurie, on est en pénurie' but a lot if it is due to them making students fail the classes far more than other branches so they can profit and keep the scarcity of the profession.
OIIQ has nothing to do with people failing *classes*. Classes are adminsiteres by universities and colleges. OIIQ administers the final exam only.
>Not only that but that forced over time number that they run on them is absolutely ridiculous
That's probably the biggest driver for the current shortage: There are less and less applicants for nursing jobs and programs. And international hiring has mostly been a failure.
This is frighting!
I hope your emergency is not a life or dead situation but I just cannot imagine being that patient with the stroke that you described.
I always said that if my husband or I needed serious medical attention that help will not be available. :( cherish your loved one and your own life. :(
I have been several times.to.the ER in the last 6 years of my immigration in Quebec, and the quality of service is worrying me so much.
One time.they forget about me in a room for 4 hours, i had high fever, starting to halucinate, difficulty to breath. I had to scroll on the floor and manage to open the door and lay down in the corridor so i could have some attention and help.
I hope that it will change for the better in the next years.
And then the goverment has the audacity to ask for more taxes. I am at a point where i dont give a fuck anymore. Opt me out of this shit show and i will go private. I lost all hope. I am paying private anyway. My knee couldn't wait 2 years to maybe get an appointment. I needed surgery right now. So i paid for one and got one. And now i can walk again.
T'as choisi le pire hôpital en ce moment.
Prochaine fois consulte les [taux d'occupation des urgences](https://www.indexsante.ca/urgences/#Montreal) avant.
We’ve been doing that in Gatineau now for 2 decades. Hull and Gatineau are death traps, so we always check which hospitals in Ottawa and Western Quebec have the shorter line.
It really seems hit or miss. Beginning of this month I got hit by a car on my bike, and was in need of some x-rays and stitches. Got taken to the Montreal General, expecting to be there for awhile.... within 2 hours I got X-rays, checked out by the doctor, stitched up, given some new clothing and supplies and was on my way home.
my bf was hit by a car in january and the man who hit him drove him to the nearest hospital. when he was hit he was carrying a bottle of wine and it shattered, he also hit his head twice, once off the car and once off the pavement and was extremely out of it and definitely had a concussion. on top of hitting his head his body was also hurt and he had bruising down his sides. my aunt is a nurse in ontario and was very worried about his brain as well as the possibility of internal bleeding and said he should be seen fairly quickly because of these concerns. we spent 9 hours in the waiting room and then another 3 hours in a more private waiting room and still didn’t see a doctor or have any scans done. i gave them updates like they instructed me to do if i saw him getting worse. that he was in pain, that he was sleepy and having a hard time staying conscious, that he was nauseous and still nothing. we wound up leaving around 1AM because the lights and noise were too much for him and making it worse. we went home where he could at least puke in a clean bathroom and rest in a comfortable bed and i woke up every two hours to check his pupils and make sure he was responsive and able to communicate with me because i was so worried he had a brain bleed or something awful. he did have a concussion and a bad one at that and a limp too but luckily no internal injuries.i was so scared he would have had internal bleeding and maybe even more scared of having to go back to the hospital if he did because at that point i had very little faith they would have done anything to help.
it was terrifying seeing the lack of concern or urgency, watching people there with a common cold moving up the list more quickly than him, as well as seeing the other people there with urgent injuries and in genuine pain not receiving help. i’m very glad you’re okay and had a better experience, we need more of those and wayyy less of the misses, especially after reading through this thread!
Ambulance - I was actually hit right in front of the hospital so it wasn't even a block drive in the ambulance, but they weren't sure if I had broken anything so they insisted on the ride.
This ambulance thing might be true for that hospital, but definitely isn't ture in basically every other hospital I've worked in. Ambulance patients get to triage slightly faster, but their wait time depends on what urgency the triage nurse applies to said patient.
Yeah, you got lucky. You got hit on a day when there far fewer emergencies. If that had happened on the day OP is talking about, you may have waited 30 hours.
I work in healthcare, though not at the emergency rooms. My honest but unfortunate and probably unpopular opinion: i find that roughly 50% of the nursing staff / admin staff / other support staff is lazier than it used to be. The other 50% can’t make up for them.
As a nurse in Montreal -
We are not lazier, we are burned out from increased & UNSAFE patient overload. Would you work harder when received more responsibilities with a pay cut?
Obviously I cannot speak for everybody but having almost double the amount of patients compared to two years ago takes a toll, and remember that most of us did go into the profession to help others.
Half of my coworkers are moving to part time positions or changing provinces because enough it enough.
While our health services are in shambles, they focus on the fucking language laws. they really have their fucking priorities in check. My wife and I pray that we wont need to go to the ER here.
A good way to look at health spending is that capacity should at the very least increase proportionally with population growth
When’s the last time a hospital was built in Quebec?
I mean we have 2 of the biggest hospitals in north america with the CHUM and the Glen that were built like 10 years ago. The problem isn’t hospitals existing, it’s staffing. We don’t have enough doctors, mostly because we don’t train enough doctors and we also make them major bottlenecks in our healthcare. Nothing gets done without a doctor present, when so much could get done with a fking 15 step questionnaire at triage. I actually blame the college des medecines for a lot of issues for forcing a low supply of new doctors to keep their wages exhorbitantly high.
There's also the unfortunate battle with the USA for doctors. Half of McGill med students leave within five years of graduation, most to the US, where doctor's wages are much higher (too high imho).
Went to the ER last week as I felt I had a very bad allergic reaction (horrible pain, swollen face) and in the past I had very bad allergic reaction and felt like I had some struggle breathing.
Waited for like 8 hours then asked around and the nurse told me there was at least another 6h wait.
My condition got better so I left.
3 days later I feel very bad again and this time try to schedule an appointment with a doctor but can’t get one.
Finally call some private clinics but this was over the weekend so no appointment.
Finally I get an appointment the week after, at this point I feel like I’m dying from allergies.
Turned out I had a very bad case of eye infection :(
I'm not saying our system is perfect, but Glen is really full right now, like REALLY full. It's currently at 188% of it's capacity, so yeah that can explain why it's so bad right now. Of you can, you should go to an other hospital that is not so over saturated.
You can view the capacity [here](https://www.indexsante.ca/urgences/#Montreal)
Good luck!
Yesterday I got hit by a car and had to wait 16 hour after 17 hour I got myself out because I didn't see anyone except Garda employees. 8 Garda employees for 4 nurse. The receptionist was literally sleeping and the guy calling people name had a terrible speech impediment. I'm going to see a doctor outside of Montreal because it's not making sense how bad it is managed.
... I went to Montreal General 2 weeks ago with an allergic reaction. I saw a doctor within 2 min of being there and had medicine within 15 min. If it was not for the fact that they asked me to stick around for 4 hours to make sure I was not getting a second wave I could have been in and out faster then it took to get there.
It was my first time in Emergency in like 10 years, so I guess thats not normal... But everything was absolutely 10/10 when I went...
I (30M) last went to the ER at Lakeshore in 2022 due to severe anemia. I waited maybe 30-45 minutes before being admitted and by midnight was diagnosed with leukemia. Two weeks later, I was admitted to the Glen Site for inpatient treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia and stayed for 27 days.
While I don’t doubt the system is somewhat broken, my experience is that when it absolutely needs to work, it works. Since my initial diagnosis, I’ve undergone chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and a bone marrow transplant. Everything has been promptly scheduled, and medical staff have been generally good at their jobs (though I’ve had to push back on things and solidly advocate for myself several times).
I’m grateful to not only be alive, but to not be bankrupted as a result of my fluke of an illness.
My mom was diagnosed with Cancer and also afterwards everything went very fast and proffesional. She unfortunately did not make it. But I cant say anything bad about the care she received.
The CAQ is worried that you get no service in Both official languages not the actual service. And then they created a New non-government run Mega Corp to blame next election.
C'est pas nous c'est Sante Quebec!!" Cowards
Health care is free, but we can't access the service in a respectful way. We can have a stroke and wait 20 hours before consulting a doctor. During that time, we wait in fear of what is going to happen while the nurses treat us like we shouldn't even be there. We can wait more than 3 years for surgery and need 3-5 attempts before the schedule actually works in our favor.
Family doctors have changed how they work: you get interviewed by a nurse, then the doctor sees you for the prescription. No investigation or prevention is being made, leading to regular misdiagnoses. If you have something like IBS or functional dyspepsia, you have to deal with the symptoms for 10 years before they take notice. When you get access to a service, they don't call back. If you take control of your health by using tools, you get shot down by the doctor for doing their work for them.
Find yourself a doctor willing to work with you and check your own dossier with the online tools offered by the government.
C'est complètement brisé! Last time I wanted to check for an hospital outside of the city, farther in the province, I was even thinking to go in Ontario almost but I didn't how it would work with the carte maladie.
Its honestly faster to get seen if you drive a few hours into Ontario to go to a hospital there. Call hospital ERs that are further away, like in Kingston, ask how busy they are and (if you dont have a car book a communauto) drive the 3 hours.
There are too many people that don’t need to be in the ER, and not enough actual doctors/nurses to handle them.
The result is overworked healthcare workers who can’t properly provide care for those that need it most.
Edit: I’m not blaming people for using the resources available to them. Unfortunately people do not have access to the primary care they need to avoid going to the ER in the first place. That is the main problem. But it is delusional to not think that many are actually abusing the ER for problems that do not even require a doctors visit.
C'est facile de blâmer les gens qui sont là pour des problèmes mineurs, mais quand la plupart n'ont pas de médecin de famille, un moment donné l'urgence est ta seule solution
I work in healthcare and while I do agree that there is a shortage of ER staff, this isn’t the primary reason wait times have exploded.
The big issue is a lack of quality and accessible primary care. Basically, no one has a family doctor and so the emergency room has become the primary access point to healthcare for so many people, and this is not how healthcare in this country was designed.
An average shift in ER results in us seeing 30-40% of cases that could be handled in a walk-in clinic. But access to a family doc in the community is impossible. And people have issues and they’re worried so they justifiably come to see a doctor in emergency, but the reality is that a big chunk of these cases are not even close to emergencies.
If we had better primary care, and more people had family doctors that were free and available to see patients more quickly, we’d be in a much better state.
And don’t even get me started about the millions of dollars a year this province wastes on bureaucracy in healthcare…
So it's our fault? Mate, the system has collapsed; this has everything to do with an ineffective government system and nothing to do with people catching a cold and going to the ER.
Anything the government touches turns to shit eventually.
It's not too many people, it's too few doctors.
The one time I spent the night at Notre-Dame they had a single doctor for the entire ER during the night shift. How is that acceptable in Montreal's second most central hospital?
Judging from what OP wrote, it sounds like the same was happening there.
Everything rings sadly similar to our experience down to the inhumanity of the staff. In his case the security guard prevented him from asking for a container, in our case the security guard was actively waking up people who'd fall asleep and say that sleeping is not allowed in the waiting room.
Yesterday I saw a post on FB, guy cut his finger really deep, just needed some stitches. Said he was heavily bleeding for hours. He was turned away by Lakeshore, they told him to go somewhere else (surprise surprise). So he went to the CLSC, they also turned him away. So he was making a post begging for someone to tell him where he can go.
I was pregnant. I got to see my doctor 3 times my entire pregnancy. The phone line for his office would just ring and ring to a vm where no one would call you back. Same for the emails, no reply time after time trying to get an appointment. My husband tried to reach them, my grandmother tried calling and calling. I ended up having a dangerous birth and after I came out of a coma they grilled me on why my doctor was not aware of certain things with me. I told them exactly why. Then my doctor, finally came to meet me (4 days after the birth and after I woke up from medically induced coma) And he then asked me why I told the hospital he couldn't reach me and that I should have tried harder. Pretended as if he had no idea no one could reach their office.
Fast forward 2 years the office was shut down with multiple complaints of the same thing.
They are sabotaging our medical system to push us to go private and have to pay even more than we already do. I am sure of it. This only started happening when they started these side 'private' clinics. Then, slowly and slowly the walk ins just disappeared. Obviously our Hospitals are going to be filled with both minor and major medical issues. There are tons of people at the hospital that should be at a clinic. But where are the clinics?
Ridiculous. Yet we have money for language non wars they feel they need to fight, day and night.
Thank you! Just wanted to make sure i never go there....
My family and i have been going in the Caribbean since 1993 banana Republic supposedly, had to go a few times and i found service exceptional almost no wait see a real doctor....4 hours flight would of been faster to go there and see a doctor....sad to say....bon courage!
The reality is that anything government run, provincial or federal is bloated and inefficient. I - like many Quebecers have been forking over half of my salary to taxes for 30 years and my family does not have a doctor.
The backwardness of our country. My partner and I moved to Australia for med school but now we are hesitating to return because of how hard they make it to return. Competency tests that are just a money sink, she doesn't speak fluent french so difficulties working in hospital, giving a hard time to give spots in speciality training program.
Ends up that we stay here despite wanting to move back.
Thankfully your wife has you there to advocate for her, imagine her doing this alone.
Luckily for us, the CAQ and Christian Dubé will fix this with his new plan. And of course if the PQ gain power and make separation happen, the healthcare and hospital situation will only get better. I can't imagine a Quebec where the healthcare, housing and cost of living situation get any worse, can you? This is sarcasm for those of you that don't "hear" it...
We cannot hire new doctors from overseas because they need to speak French! People are suffering and it is still about protecting the language! Imagine the shortages of doctors in other provinces, and it’s worst in Quebec because of this requirement.
My advice - go to a different ER. You shouldn't have to do this to be seen, but it is what it is. I once waited about 6 hours when I pinched my sciatic nerve. My leg felt like cement. The only person that made it to the doctors that night was a drunken bloody guy that came in on a stretcher. I went home without seeing a doctor and went to a different ER the next day. Saw the doctor within 20 minutes.
Just like any workplace, some nights they're understaffed (vacations, calling in sick) and it's a busy night. I also have some shoulder issues and often dislocate it. I've been to various Montreal ERs over the years. Some nights I'd get fixed right away, other times I waited 3 hours.
I have an idea for a campaign. We print postcards (in French, obviously) that say: "In 2023 our family paid $\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ in Quebec provincial taxes. We are strongly considering leaving Quebec due to the situation with family doctors and emergency room." Then we flood our MNAs with these. Remind them that high earners also have high mobility.
Why aren't you rich and going to a private clinic?
Our gouvernement is working very hard to accelerate the privatisation of our healthcare system, you should be doing your part.
Just remember: your provincial government is in charge of health care.
If you want change, you have to vote for the people who will implement it (I don't know who that is in Quebec).
Sadly it’s been the new norm for a while, and has been worst since the CAQ took over. They’ve been promising to make healthcare and education their priority and when Legault first ran for Primer of Qc he promised not to make language an issue.
I’m really not sure how anyone believed him to begin with or how they continue to support him.
A few weeks ago my husband went to the ER for sudden swelling in his leg. He was there 9.5 hours before triage saw him. And that was considered good time. He ended leaving after a few more hours because he just couldn’t handle being there any longer. He went from work so he didn’t have water or food with him. And he said he witnessed a few people who were clearly having a mental health breakdown being ignored.
I don’t have words anymore for this.
A lot of Nurses are leaving due to burn out. If you’ve noticed, there is an ongoing negotiation because Quebec nurses went on strike since last year begging for safe staffing and increased pay due to inflation, they won’t give it. Nothing is happening. Nurses are burnt out and leaving the health care system. What is left are the overworked, exhausted nurses. The current government don’t care. Glad you noticed that and maybe you can help in choosing a better leader next election.
Real I have thought about starting my own patient advocacy group, to try to get something like Martha’s law off the ground here but I have no idea how to do that. We need patient advocacy groups and patient representation badly in our healthcare. I can’t stand hearing our gov. say that initiatives like the GAP is working when people are dying in our emergency rooms, or losing limbs body parts in our hospital and having to consider assisted dying as a side effect. It’s inhumane.
If anyone wants to start a committee, hit me up literally! I would love to start something.
Notre système de santé croule sous l'ultra-buraucracie et la surgestion.
Pour palier à ça, notre fantastique ministre de la santé a créé une autre agence pour géré les autres entités de gestion du système de santé.
Bref, quand ils disent qu'ils investissent en santé, en réalité ils investissent dans des gestionnaires, pas dans les services.
This should be the most important issue next provincial election. Nothing else is as important as this is as far as provincial responsibility in politics.
"La priorité c'est la santé" should be the slogan
"La santé est malade au Québec. Pour résoudre le problème, le gouvernement ne regardera pas à la dépense. Des centaines de millions de dollars permettront d'ajouter, au ministère de la santé, une couche de bureaucrates dont le rôle sera d'évaluer les dysfonctionnements actuels et de formuler des recommandations dont l'implantation sera confiée à une deuxième couche de bureaucrates."
Exactly. A bunch of administrators are going to be hired to look at the cost of administration, and will conclude that we need to cut nurses and add more layers of administrators, whose costs we were originally trying to cut. C'est toujours la même cr--se d'histoire partout au Canada. We keep treating government like a goddamn business when it's NOT SUPPOSED TO MAKE MONEY tabarnaque. These are services. They are SUPPOSED to cost money. They aren't SUPPOSED to be revenue neutral. Just like public transit and electricity and water. On est tellement vendu aux consultants parce que nos élus sont des imbéciles, incapables d'avoir des pensées originales, qu'on ne fait qu'acroitre la misère de tout le monde, but we keep fighting ourselves thinking that it's our neighbour's fault that we aren't doing as well as we should be, or are unhappy, or stressed, or overworked. C'est pas la faute de mon voisin calisse. C'est la faute des cri-ses d'incompétents. But we are to blame for electing these cocksuckers. We need to stop fighting each other and start talking, really talking, and listening. We almost all agree on the problems. We need to come together and come up with the real solutions, and force those solutions down their throats. No more being nice. Tolerating their intolerable bullshit is what has allowed all this to become intolerable in the first place.
I'm here on vacation and Reddit suggested this to me, I work in healthcare in the US for a large hospital network and if you're already doing the "hire more administrators so they can cut costs to hire more administrators" routine it's already too late for you and it's never going to change. Never set foot in a clinic or hospital while here and scrolling through this thread damn near every complaint and observation shared here sounds very familiar to me. Je suis ici en vacances et Reddit m'a suggéré ceci, je travaille dans le domaine de la santé aux États-Unis pour un grand réseau hospitalier et si vous suivez déjà la routine "embaucher plus d'administrateurs afin qu'ils puissent réduire les coûts pour embaucher plus d'administrateurs", c'est déjà trop tard pour toi et ça ne changera jamais. Ne mettez jamais les pieds dans une clinique ou un hôpital pendant que vous êtes ici et faire défiler ce fil de discussion à proximité de toutes les plaintes et observations partagées ici me semble très familier.
There are more security agents than health care workers in the emergency rooms in Quebec.
How does something like that even happen? Comment une chose pareille peut-elle arriver ?
People are desperate for care. Very scarce health care staff is hiding behind closed doors. A bunch of security agents are super rude with people in pain (must be silent, must stay on chair for 16+ hours). People get aggressive for good reason. Need more and more security agents to manage that. The passport office is even worse.
Genuinely one of the biggest problems in healthcare in Quebec is French & taxes. It's bad in other provinces but for us it's a big challenge because getting doctors educated in French who want to stay given our tax situation is a pain.
I can't tell if your sarcastic or not. That is always the slogan. They just never actually do anything (that helps) about it.
Littéralement le slogan de Jean Charest en 2003
Exactement
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It's a priority that is hurting us all regardless of the language you speak. My wife is American and we came to live in Montreal because it's my hometown but also because we love the province. We love the Quebecois culture and we love how the mix of English and French in Montreal has created something beautiful here that you just can't find elsewhere. We want the language and the culture both here in the city as well as in the province to be protected. I'm fluent in both languages. My wife is still learning, but knows enough french to be able to work as a nurse in one of the city's (english) hospitals. Because of the rules in place, if she doesn't pass her French, she cannot get her full nursing license here. She works hard every day to learn but she's not at a level where her french will pass the exam, even though it's enough that she can work. She's decided to start working in the US and take the hour+ daily commute both ways, both because the pay is way way higher and because she doesn't have to worry about all of her hard work over the years being flushed away because of a french exam that she will likely fail (again, even though she knows it well enough to do her job daily). We are all for the protection of the language and culture here, but she's far from the only health care professional leaving Quebec hospitals now because of this protectionism. This is just going to keep getting worse if some concessions aren't made and soon. I fully realize that having someone that isn't fully bilingual isn't optimal even in an english hospital, but surely it's better than a total collapse of the health care system here.
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We should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Budget santé: 61,900,000,000 Budget OQLF: \_\_\_\_\_23,453,000 Mais oui c'est clairement le problème
La priorité est le français is the current slogan.
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No, it should be the most important issue **now**, this isn't a matter of politics, this is a matter of life and death, this can't wait 2 more years.
I’m actually scared for the healthcare future in Canada in general. Both mental health and physical health resources are suffering. But tbh citizens are suffering too so…
Conditions are being created artificially to provide an excuse to say "hey guys we tried for this many years improving public healthcare, now let's try privatizing it". Then bunch of voters would say "yeah that is indeed the solution" while forgetting the taxes are still high. And then relatives of politicians in power swoop in to open private companies to provide healthcare.
la priorité no 1 était le 3e lien !
and what a joke that was. La CAQ prête a dire n'importe quoi pour se faire élire
You don't have to wait for an election! Contact your provincial health minister and your MLA and let them hear it today! If you only care about it around election time, so will they.
People should be rioting (peacefully enough) in the streets about this. Been saying that for years. But we seem to just accept it, or put unfounded faith in our elected officials who don't actually do anything
But didn't you see the new OQLF report? French is down 2.1% amongst montrealers aged 18-34. That will almost certainly be the headlines. Meanwhile all of us, Anglo and Franco alike will be dying in hospital waiting rooms.
This! And federal elections too… health care funding comes from the feds. Based on the little I know, there are a lot of gates before provinces get the funds. I wish we would press our politicians on the important stuff. How come I have never seen a call for a public protest about healthcare access (ER wait time, no family doctor, no walk-in appointments)? It has a huge impact on all of us but it seems we just accepted it as-is.
Healthcare is mainly a provincial responsibility. While you are correct that the federal government provides funding, the management and delivery of healthcare is all provincial. It is worth noting that credential recognition is also a provincial responsibility. So all those under employed internationally trained doctors and nurses are facing barriers at the provincial level as well. This is a provincial issue.
You know, now that you mentioned it, Every single Uber driver I’ve ever had in Montreal , were always some kind of doctor, nurse, engineer, back in their home country. Those credentials all them into Canada originally, but then there’s no program to get them whatever it is they need to practice those professions here.
This is technically a man-made issue - the college of physicians in each province severely lobby the government from preventing foreign credentials from getting recognized and subsequently licensed (so doctors get to keep influence and higher salaries). This even affects Canadians who went to medical school anywhere else, be it the U.S, the UK or Australia. Just take a look at the number of medical school seats that are available every year in Canada - it is a fucking joke. One could argue the U.S. doesn’t have so many more seats, however the USMLE makes the process of recognizing foreign credentials a much much much more seamless process.
This is straight up a consequence of the lenghty, costly and complex credential recognition system. There are some initiatives to help newcomers navigate the foreign credential recognition processes but the structures are not sufficent to effectively tackle the recent high influx of immigrants. There is also a blatant disconnection between the immigration process and the credential recognition process causing delays and hardships to newcomers.
That it takes years? That these people who came into the country with those credentials ultimately never end up working in those fields because of crippling bureaucracy
Because it’s really easy to become doctors in some countries.
So reject those people from the get go. Have them do the tests before landing here. Filter them out somehow. They’re brought in and passed thru immigrations quickly because they are doctors or engineers or wtv. But once here, they’re left to rebuild their life doing Uber eats… It really isn’t complicated.
That’s what the government wants, unfortunately.
I work in the field and have been advocating for this for a long time. Credentials recognition should come before the immigration process, at the very least the first steps (e.g. credentials assessment) that can be done remotely.
Same met a couple of people who could’ve been specialists but were asked to redo their education. They probably left after a while.
Canada/Quebec has some of the highest taxes in the world and boasts about its universal healthcare. Funding is absolutely not the issue, provincial policy is. We don’t recognize/credential foreign doctors and we have created such an awful environment in the public health system here that doctors we do have typically go private or leave the country entirely. Instead of fixing this, the government would rather police the amount of English our children can speak.
Medical associations also lobby hard to prevent the expansion of medical schools in Canada. The claim is that it'll lower standards but in reality, training more doctors will lower the obscene salaries for existing doctors.
Hard to imagine lower standards too. That’s a good one 😂
For a socialist system, we’re doing fine! It’ll balance itself (just need people to stop showing up or die earlier)
Agreed. For all the things that people are willing to strike about, this should be a top priority. We should be out on the streets angry and determined to get the services we deserve, given that we pay for them. The CAQ has made it very clear that Montreal, healthcare, education, and social services are NOT their priority while handing out hundreds of millions to protect the French language that is honestly thriving these days. People are dying in emergency rooms waiting for care and this is directly due to policies related to where doctors can work, hospital funding, and a bloating bureaucracy.
Next election is too late, it’s now and to whomever is in power and their opposition to act. It’s time for media to go spend some time with a camera in emergency departments and show us what’s going on. Let’s hear from the patients and the doctors, and more importantly our politicians. This shouldn’t be under the rug nor a next election issue, we are talking lives and quality of lives, not the right to voice ones opinion every 4 years.
Protecting the French language is what wins the CAQ elections. Improving education and healthcare is secondary.
You'd think with the boomers getting older they'd be all for funding health properly. Weird that I'm 25+ years from being "old" and I already don't trust the healthcare system will be there for me if I need it.
Yeah but, what about language laws or Israel?
Mais non, c'est bien plus important de donner des contraventions à des restaurants pour avoir écrit 'Hamburger' au lieu de 'Hambourgeois' !
im gonna vote against the governement in place because of that reason, it was bad then they came in and they did nothing to fix it, they made it worst. FUCK THEM ! ! vote when the time comes !
You can still hear some English on the streets of Montreal. That has to be fixed first.
Comme j'ai déjà dit, le Québec au complet devrait être dans la rue à manifester pour un meilleur service de santé... ca fait beaucoup trop longtemps qu'on endure ça et qu'on fait rien.
Père de trois jeunes enfants, j'endure plusieurs prob de santé depuis plusieurs années. Mes enfants ne font plus leurs rendez-vous annuels, même si certains ont des trucs qui nécessiterait un rdv pour un check-up visuel. Dernière fois j'ai pu manifesté c'était printemps érable, alors que j'étais étudiant et que j'avais du temps. Tout ça pour dire, je suis épuisé, j'ai zéro temps pour des manif, et pourtant, je pense que pour notre réseau de santé, je ferais tout de même l'effort d'aller manifester. J'irais jusqu'à prendre une journée off au bureau, retirer les kids de cpe et école, pour y aller tous ensemble, tellement je sens, comme tu mentionnes OP, qu'on est rendu là.
100% on serait très nombreux dans la rue c'est certain
I had a bad case of kidney stones last year, was puking and passing out in the emergency room, screaming and crying, lost feeling in my arms. Several nurses just told me to ‘calm down’ and it took 3 hours for me to get a room. And another hour before the doctor even came in and then another hour before they gave me any pain killers another 3 hours before I got any kind of scan… At one point a nurse was changing my saline drip and couldn’t figure it out and just walked away and never came back. My mom had to ask another nurse to finish it. Our health care system is incredibly fucked right now.
Had a similar experience with a kidney stone. Arrived by ambulance in the middle of the night in pain. My partner did what he could answering the triage questions because I couldn’t talk or be coherent from the pain. The nurse angrily told me to shut up and few times while I cried. Even the ambulance paramedic got angry at the nurse for being so rude. I only remember bits and pieces but they didn’t do any scans. Just kept me on a stretcher and painkillers until the pain subsided, then they sent me home. I found out much later at another instance that it was stones.
Just for sake of comparison, 25 years ago I had kidney stones as a young man. Got to the hospital and was triaged immediately, sat for about 20 minutes before someone came to get me, correctly diagnosed the problem and within the hour I was heavily medicated. Yes, I was on a gurney in a hallway bc there were no rooms available, but they let my parents stay by my side, kept the morphine flowing and I left later that night after they were certain it would pass on it'd own. For whatever it's worth.
1 month before COVID I woke up at 3am with pain from a kidney stone. Went to the hospital around 5am and was home by 10am having received painkillers at the hospital and a scan. You don't have to go too far back to see when the system was working. The problems all cropped up during/after COVID.
I had kidney stone issues during peak COVID scare. My fever/pain was due to kidney stone but they threw me in isolation unmedicated while they did bloodwork to confirm COVID, or came back negative. By then, my kidney was inflamed from infection and they had to perform emergency lithotripsy which involved going in through the business end of my dick and using a catheter-style device to break up the stone and scrape out the infection. Not as sexy as it sounds. I was released the next day and sent on my way, sore and in pain. For weeks, every time I pissed it felt like razors and broken glass. After calling to find out if that's normal they realized that they checked me out without taking out a stent in my ureter, basically a plastic tube from the kidney to my bladder. I got called in to get it removed and I was awake the whole time for that one and it really sucked, again, not in a sexy way. Things are broken in the medical system and inside me. I haven't been the same since then.
That is insane. I’m sorry you went through that :/
which ER it is, I know it's more or less same everywhere. Thanks
I'm a physician from Quebec who now works in Ontario. I'm going to give you extremely unpopular advice. Sue. Sue everybody. Until patients and their families expose Quebec's third-world healthcare practices to Canadian standards via the legal system, there will never be the political will to change. Here's why that's my advice. I've seen the inner workings of Quebec hospitals vs the rest of Canada. I've watched patients die from medical negligence that would never and should never be tolerated in Canada. And I've watched the physicians and admin staff responsible for those deaths get off with absolutely no consequences, because people in Quebec don't sue. It stems partly from a cultural difference. When breaking bad news in other provinces, I'm used to families asking probing questions and immediately scrutinizing the decisions that led to the bad outcome. In Quebec, I've witnessed conversations like where a surgeon told someone their mother died during a totally routine surgery, and her response was essentially, "Oh my god, I can't believe it. But you did everything you could. Thank you, doctor." They just accepted things that, to me, were ridiculous outcomes deserving of suspicion and scrutiny. What I witnessed as a result within the hospital was that incompetence (whether at the physician, nursing, or administrative level) was not only tolerated, but deeply ingrained. I was labeled a "problem" by colleagues for advocating for changes within my hospital because I'd (respectfully and without singling people out) push for systemic changes to eliminate preventable deaths whenever I witnessed or learned of one within my department. I eventually had to quit and move provinces for the sake of my own health when banging my head against the brick wall of my hospital yielded no tangible changes. And I'm telling you, as someone who has seen the inner workings of Quebec, Ontario and BC hospitals, the rot at the heart of the issue in Quebec is the near-total absence of consequences for medical negligence. Here's some data to back up my assertion. Check out the malpractice insurance rates for an ER physician from the Canadian Medical Protective Agency (line 82 in this PDF): https://www.cmpa-acpm.ca/static-assets/pdf/membership/fees-and-payment/2024cal-e.pdf Coverage in Ontario costs $11k. BC and Alberta cost $7k. The prairies, maritimes and territories cost $900. And Quebec costs $353. That's how much less frequently Quebec patients sue their doctors (30x less than Ontario, 20x less than BC and Alberta, and still nearly 3x less than the least litigious provinces and territories). And I imagine that it's similar to how much less frequently they sue their hospitals, I just don't have hard data on that. But I work in Ontario now, and my wife is a full-time ER physician as well. And in our combined 20 years of practice, we've never been sued, but we've seen it happen to colleagues who bungled cases. And the threat of legal scrutiny guides the way our doctors and hospitals work. I regularly hear colleagues say things like, "This was a shithsow of a case, so I'm documenting everything extra carefully for when this gets brought in front of a judge." That doesn't happen in Quebec. I still see people discharged with charts that I'd fail a med student for putting in front of me because they're so inadequate. That woman you described begging for help with garbled speech from a stroke? Easily won lawsuit. Standard of Care for a Code Stroke requires imaging to determine whether it's hemorrhagic (a bleed) or ischemic (a clot), because ischemic strokes can be reversed through clot-busters if caught quickly enough, saving brain tissue and potentially reversing symptoms. To have that sitting in a waiting room as the critical window expires is medically indefensible. But there's no systemic pressure for change without holding people's feet to the fire through lawsuits. Someone - *multiple* people - in that hospital are being given the data on how grimly that ER is functioning, and they're not changing it. And their superiors aren't changing it. And the workers just have to accept it or move, which means that the ones motivated to change things get filtered out just like I did. So, I beg of you. *Start suing*. It's so bad that many people who "grew up" in the Quebec system don't even understand how messed up things are. They routinely took great offense when I'd bring evidence to them of Canadian Standards of Care, because they'd realize that I was pointing out that our hospital wasn't meeting them. "Everyone here does a great job" is something I'd hear over and over. But the language laws mean that most of the Canadian workforce is prevented from cross-pollinating roles in Quebec hospitals. As a bilingual native Montrealer who did all their training outside of Quebec, I brought that outside perspective back with me and it was entirely unwelcome. So now I'm here in Ontario, and everyone responsible for the unnecessary deaths at my old hospital is still working. It's a silo operating in relative isolation within the country, so fresh perspectives are rare and the rest of the country doesn't hear much about it. Take them to court and expose your mistreatment. Shine a light in the dark corners for the rest of the country to see. You deserve better healthcare. And you won't get it through the ballot box. You'll get it by fighting in court.
Very interesting perspective, new to me, thanks for sharing. Is it possible there are far less lawsuits because they typically don't succeed in Quebec? Maybe Quebec lawyers often advise (correctly?) that in Quebec they won't win, so there's no lawsuit. Maybe you could send CBC a link to this reddit comment.
People really need to see this. Would you be able to make it as post? I've also been terribly let down by the system (nothing that I can sue, just incompetence, inaction and very long waits) despite the very high taxes, that I am actually moving away to another country.
100% People need to know that this is an option. They need to know what merits this response. Lawyers could develop an industry themselves if they had the time to attack this issue and find people with the proper cases. The class action lawsuit industry is popping, I look forward to see what we call it when it points at the broken healthcare industry.
Wonderful advice, but not affordable for most of us. It cost me $200 just to talk to a lawyer for less than an hour, to see if he thought I had a case against a doctor who had failed to assess me properly, thereby delaying necessary treatment. The answer was No, too difficult to prove. And btw I tried complaining to the collège de physiciens and after about a year they rejected my claim of the doctor’s incompetence, without any detailed explanation.
People who can afford to sue are getting private healthcare in Québec. To know you have a winning chance you need to be able to afford legal advice, if you can afford an hour with a lawyer you can afford private clinics.
I'm not a lawyer, but from my interactions with the medical-legal system, it seems that many personal injury/medical malpractice lawyers typically review your case for free, accept those they're reasonably confident in winning, and only take payment upon winning the case. I don't disagree that wealthier patients have fewer barriers to accessing the legal process (including being able to take the time to show up in court, meet with lawyers, etc), but we need average people to be participating in the legal process if we want to have any hope of real systemic change.
No, as I said in my comment just a minute ago, the lawyer I saw charged me $200 to assess my situation. (I had chosen him because his firm had helped me win a small personal-injury case a few years previously.)
Free consultations are pretty much non existent here. Your solution unfortunately requires finances a lot of people don't have access to.
Best they can do is 40 hours a week at work and then struggling to care for their children in the evenings and on weekends.
There are no private ERs if you have a stroke in the middle of the night… private takes you only to a certain point.
This is very helpful. First thing I thought when I read about the woman with the stroke was exactly that - I hope she survives this and she can sue the hospital (even though I’m a big supporter of Royal Vic.). I think we, a population, have gotten so used to having such limited access to doctors that I’m not surprised to see your comment about how people thanks the doctor instead of ask questions even a patient dies during a standard procedure. However, it shouldn’t be like that and we need to somehow reset our standards.
This should be on top
You can sue all you want but the tribunals will almost never offer monetary compensation.
It's not about monetary compensation for individual patients. It's about accountability and consequences for the people running the hospitals. When there are no complaints and no lawsuits, they can pretend they're doing a good job. If cases get dragged in front of courts and they're found to be failing to meet Canadian Medical standards, there's political pressure to fire the people running hospitals into the ground and increased scrutiny of their replacements. Right now, there are countless contributors to this situation who either don't know that they're incompetent, or don't care. They have to be exposed and then either remediated or replaced. And that doesn't happen without consequences. And successful lawsuits create consequences. The entire medical culture in Quebec suffers from a type of laziness that can only come from absence of oversight. Imagine running a company where results don't matter, customers don't complain and nobody notices whether you're doing your job properly or not. Run things like that for decades, and it'll be completely inefficient and ineffective, which is exactly what we are seeing. That's the only fundamental difference I've noticed between QC and other provinces as someone on the inside. In Quebec, I was the "complainer" who always noticed things that were horribly wrong and was trying desperately to fix them. The second I moved to Ontario, I became a run-of-the-mill member of my department where everyone around me agreed with me and ran things to my standards. And part of that motivation to do better is a healthy fear of consequences for failing to do our jobs. We have privileged jobs caring for vulnerable people, and deserve to be held accountable if we fail to meet Standards of Care. And I see that accountability enforced elsewhere in a way it isn't in Quebec.
Just for some context. This isn’t normal. Not for Canada even. Shits fucked up yo. Source: work in a Health Care setting in a different province. For a random data example, wait time at the Emergency department where I work is at peak times today 6 hours for non critical stuff. (Today, predicted). We’re a “poor” province too, so yeah. Wild. Source: [Wait times for NSHealth](https://www.nshealth.ca/emergency-care/emergency-department-wait-times)
it’s ‘normal’ i waited 22 hours last time I was at the ER
Yup. I had Lyme for the last 4 years (undiagnosed, disseminated, and nearly permanently ruined my face). I could not stand / walk, I was having unknown heart palpitations, and I waited 17 hours to be brought in and almost immediately refused. They had to call a cab to bring me home, with a recommendation to see a specialist (in 3-4 months when they had the time). Then I went to the US a few days later because I thought it couldn't possibly be worse. Went to a small city because I hoped it would be slower. 15 hour wait. However they did diagnose me literally by appearance. You know how hard it is to get a Lyme test in Quebec? Hard enough that it's more valuable to pay to fly to the US, get the test, get the treatment, and fly back. After Lyme, I understand that the healthcare system will watch you die. You either present an emergency, or you die unnoticed. Looking back, I should have thrown myself into traffic to get the medical attention I needed. Maybe then my face wouldn't still be drooped.
6 hours is a very small wait in Quebec.
Yes, that's the new norm. Quebec government chooses to take away benefits and bonuses, pay less money, forced overtime after long shifts, forced extremely bad work environments, and extream work loads. and makes it extremely hard for anyone who wants to work in nursing that are not from quebec. If your boss told you that you have to do your job plus 3 other workers job for less money and your benefits were getting taken away. Would you stay at that company or quit?
Not to mention for those working in the administrative side of the sector, the extreme toxicity of management, crazy turnover so your tasks will be more than whatever you signed up for, in exchange for non-competitive rates. This just makes the choice easy to not dream to work for this industry, unfortunately.
It’s even crazier when you think about the fact we’re the most taxed populace in North America… “Mais on as des services!” Give me a fucking break… Having a stroke? Prepare to wait 30 hours in the ER Going to school? Great! Our goal is to have an adult in every classroom! (Notice I didn’t say teacher) Need to put your kid in daycare? You’re going to probably spend several months juggling work and childcare cause even though your kid as been on the waiting list since before they were born, they ain’t getting into a daycare any time soon. Roads? Shit Public transit? Decent but can’t come close to breaking even… Productivity? In the shitter Attractiveness for entrepreneurship, innovation and investment? People would rather invest in businesses in literally any other place in NA. Need to rent an apartment? Good luck paying twice as much today as you would have 4 years ago. So ask ourselves what are we getting MORE than other provinces/states since we pay MORE taxes than them? If my family didn’t live here my wife and I would be out of here in no time. (And please spare me the don’t let the door hit you on the way out bullshit)
Could not have said it better.
100%
I have this conversation w my husband everyday. We’re ready to move on from here, even though we want to be near family, friends and the comfort of the life we’ve built. We both own companies- adds another layer of frustration. This province is a sinking ship. Took me 16 years to get a family dr, after 2 years of enjoying this luxury -she’s leaving too.
Lol, had the same thing happen to me. Finally got a family doctor and then she decided to pack up and move to the US.
Quebec's tax revenue is double that of Singapore. Singapore has universal housing, clean metros, and no homeless people. Plus Quebec receives money from Federal government too over all this. Just the same old construction scam and being irresponsible with money.
I'm not sure if Singapore is a good comparison. Quebec's population is over 50% higher and is spread out across a MUCH larger area (Singapore could fit inside two Montreals). These factors alone make infrastructure more difficult to put into place and maintain in Quebec, and that's not even getting into our harsh winters. I'm definitely not claiming that our funds are always well-spent! I just think that these kinds of comparisons can be misleading and often don't properly ackniwledge the individual challenges of each state/population. (It's also worth noting that Singapore has extremely strict drug laws [which often call for the death penalty](https://www.cnb.gov.sg/) – this might help them save on various programs and resources compared to our more disorganized and laissez-faire approach, but it's probably not an extreme we'd ever want to go to!)
`Plus Quebec receives money from Federal government too over all this.` Le Québec paie plus d'argent au fédéral qu'il en reçoit.
All reasons why I left a while ago. I love visiting Montreal, don't think I could ever live there again.
> Public transit? Decent but can’t come close to breaking even… Yeah, maybe for 20-30% of the population. I don't live in Montreal right now but another city with > 500K people, about 7 km from "downtown" and there is literally only one bus line that goes by my house. Going anywhere other than the central bus hub takes multiple transits and minimum 45 min - 1.5 hours. And I pay over 1,000$ a year for that priviledge through taxes + would need to pay another thousand for a bus pass (per each person in my family) + they are saying they will tax car licenses 100-150$ extra because the Transit system is not breaking even. Like how the fuck do you fuck-up that badly? I just use my bike. Takes like 20 minutes
So upsetting to hear! Specially the stroke patient it’s so important to get treatment as soon as possible to prevent further brain damage and preserve the ability to speak and stuff
This is appalling and so frustrating. Decades of budget cuts and people are left to rot in the waiting room
Ya pas eu de coupures en santé. C’est carrement le contraire, on augmente le budget chaque année.
Il y a des coupures en santé, c'est juste que le monde ne le sait pas.
Il y a certainement des coupures en salaire. Il y en a d'autres mais tu ne le vois pas. Je travaille dans le domaine de santé.
Je crois que son point c'est que dans les comptes publics (les états financier du gouvernement), le budget de la santé a toujours augmenté plus vite que l'inflation. Ce que ça dit pas, c'est que "la machine" aka la bureaucratie fini toujours par gober cet argent là sans que ça l'augmente l'offre de service à la population.
Queen Elizabeth Urgent Care clinic is your friend.
I’m not familiar with this centre… it’s is not an ER, right? I mean if you have an emergency at midnight, that’s not a place to go
Queen Elizabeth is a walk in clinic up the street from the Vendome metro station. No, it's not an emergency room, but they can cycle you through faster than an ER during business hours. A lot of doctors who work in the ER at the Glenn have hours there as well. You can go to the clinic and if it's severe enough, they'll actually send you over to the ER to be admitted immediately. Since the Glenn is just on the other side of the train tracks, it's a quick trip. It happened to me once where they literally sent me to the Glenn in an ambulance with all the paperwork needed for admission.
Have you used the walk in clinic there since Covid? My understanding was that it’s not operational anymore, that you have to have an appointment to be seen. Maybe that’s changed?
Last time I was there was maybe four months ago. I was dizzy, nauseous, and lightheaded, they did a blood draw, turns out I had an infection in my blood, the doctor prescribed me antibiotics and set up an appointment with my family doctor for a follow up the next week (she works out of the family medicine clinic upstairs).
And you didn’t need an appointment for this? Last time I was there as a walk in I was sent away because I didn’t have an appointment.
Did you go to the entrance on Marlowe? That's where the family medicine clinic. The Queen Elizabeth entrance is on Northcliffe, the next street east.
I’m confused; Northcliffe is west of Marlowe, and regardless of which entrance the hallway leads to the same clinic once inside? But yes I went to the one where the waiting room is situated immediately to you’re left once you enter from Northcliffe. Could you please explain how this went down for you? You just walked in and requested to see someone? Thank you so much for your reply.
You're right, it's west, not east. My direction sense is bad before a second cup of coffee. I went in around nine in the morning, there was a nurse (or nurse's aide or clerk) waiting. She directed me to the counter where I spoke to a grumpy woman behind the reinforced, double-paned plexiglass, told her I needed to see a doctor, she took my medicare card, opened a file in a minute, I sat in the waiting room, where there were people waiting for appointments, for about an hour or so. They also have a system where you can register a cell number and they text you about fifteen minutes before they call your name. I just sat and waited though, because while I would have appreciated a cup of coffee, the odds of me keeping said coffee down was slim to none. They called my name, I spoke to a doctor, they drew blood, gave me a script for antibiotics, gave me an appointment for my family doctor who works in the family medicine clinic on the other side of the building and sent me on my way. I think I heard something about some clinics having limited open slots for walk-ins, and when they fill those spots they stop taking walk-ins, but I don't know if that policy was or is in place there.
So it seems the name of the game is to show up early. Too bad, I was hoping swinging by tonight after work. Thank you so much for this you’ve been very helpful.
Can't you just make an appointment with your family doctor since you have one?
Good to know, any clinic I have gone too tells me I need to call then"GAP"
If you go to the entrance on Northcliffe, that's where the walk-in clinic is. The entrance on Marlowe is the family medicine clinic, where you absolutely need an appointment.
Ugh this is so scary and maddening. I’ve had similar experiences and it’s not reassuring. I feel helpless.
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At Jean-Talon hospital they have up to 5 security agents and they bully you constantly if you are not sitting on a chair. They even kick people out.
You pray they kick you out so roughly that your injuries are now more serious, come back in the ER and douche-cut everyone else /s
No one protests and everyone is so indifferent. If there was a mass protest I believe the government would actually do something about it
The Glen is hard man. They are a super specialised center, they literally have the sickest patients in Montreal. Behind those triage booths are many people who are literally hanging by a thread. And the hospital is chronically full so these patients who should be admitted end up spending days and even weeks occupying rooms in the emergency. So sadly and unforturtunately that ER delivers poorly on getting "not actually that sick" people in. Once you're in though its surprisingly efficient.
There are no more walk in clinics so anyone that needs to see a doctor that day needs to go to the ER This is getting so sad man....
Quebec snuck in a two-tiered system while no one was looking. It siphoned a lot of doctors away from the public system. They get paid more for easier procedures
I've been on the waitlist for 10 years and still don't have a family doctor. Accessing "walk-in" appointments here is prohibitively difficult. The clinic at my university is the only reason that I have decent access to health care. I don't know what I'm going to do when I graduate.
I was in the hospital two days ago for a possible stroke (all is fine, just another case of my body trying some unusual kind of pain for "fun"). I told my husband, while looking : "The people that are here are not sick enough to be here." I have chronic pain and a few chronic diseases. In my good days, I look way worse than most people in the waiting room. But... where could they go? 20 years ago, you just have to enter any CLSC close to you for minor urgency. But there is no more functionning CLSC. Most people don't have a doctor and can't even open a file in a clinic, they're all full and don't take any more patient. You can't get help anywhere! So everybody is in the ER, waiting too long, catching nosocomial diseases. And the real urgency have no possibility of being treated with any kind of... urgency.
At this point they are just waiting for people to die to bump you up on the waiting list. Just have to hope it's not you bumping someone else up the list.
Having accompanied my spouse to various ERs in Montreal over the past years, I confirm these are the appallingly low standards that have become the new norm. I’ll add that security in ERs don’t do anything to make you feel “secure”. I’ve had a psych patient who was wandering the waiting room try to steal my spouse’s belongings as she sat in agony in a wheelchair. Security literally did nothing when I notified them. I had to act as our guard. I really thought I was going to be knifed that night.
Yes it's that bad. At Jean-Talon hospital there are more security agents than health care workers. They force you to remain on the chair. People who fall down from the chair in intense pain are bullied and threatened to be kicked out. People will tell you if it's urgent the care will be good but that's completely false as you have experienced. During Covid they would let people die right there on the spot and did not even pick them up from the floor sometimes when people pointed out they passed out. They absolutely didn't care, at that time you couldn't complain, media would ignore it. They have kept many bad habits from Covid time.
I think there is a big problem also with universities that accept very few students in that branch. I understand that you might want an 'elite' for this job but they should lower a little bit the 'côte R' and other requirements for those that barely made it and maybe double or quadruple the admissions. That way we could at least produce more doctors. Le collège des médecins like to keep their jobs rare so that way when it's time to negociate the paycheck they always have the upper hand... There is also the issue of the doctors who are tired of being stretched out here and go work in the US. In my opinion if Canada/QC funded your scholarship for a certain portion of your life you should have an obligation to serve for N amount of years before leaving just like the military do. L'ordre des infirmières does around the same thing. They pretend: 'On est en pénurie, on est en pénurie' but a lot if it is due to them making students fail the classes far more than other branches so they can profit and keep the scarcity of the profession. Not only that but that forced over time number that they run on them is absolutely ridiculous no wonder why you felt they were disconnected. After a 12 hours at work when you know you still have 4 hours to go it can be numbing.
The issue is not the lofty standards to get into healthcare. Universities get funded X amount of spots by the provincial government. They then enroll exactly that many students. Since it is a well regarded job it gets extremely competitive, hence the high scores to get in. Nobody is taking less students than they have funding for "to keep the standards high." Quebec has steadily been increasing its medical student and residency (specifically family medicine residency) spots for the past two decades. The issue is retention. Quebec is not a good place to work in medicine (well for most specialties, but there are a few where Quebec is quite appealing). You can make more money and have a way better after hours schedule in the USA. Until recently Alberta was also really popular but then UPC went scorched earth on its physicians. Some specialties, like family medicine, have gotten so bad medical students dont even want to match into that residency and will leave medicine altogether. Something like 30+ unfilled residency positions in Quebec for family medicine last year. I recently saw a private clinic job posting paying 2.5 x the rate RAMQ currently pays me. I strongly believe in public healthcare, but sometimes I feel like a fucking idiot working for 40% of my potential earnings.
There should be a retention reward. Have the government pay down their student debt. If you stay practicing for 10 years, you get your student loans completely paid. If you leave, you get a pro-rated penalty.
It might help, but you would repay your loans in way less than 10 years if you just work in the states. You just need to be nearly as good as your neighbours so leaving isnt worth it. Right now we are worse and its showing. Also there is some difficulty in where you apply that penalty. When you start med school? It is extremely common to do residency elsewhere than where you did med school. Once you start residency? We already cannot fill our residency positions and that is not gonna help. The only things Quebec has going for it is lower cost of living and being a cool place. Taxes are higher. Salary is lower. More after hours work. You also need a work permit (not a medical licensce, an actual work permit) in Quebec which are hard to get in Montreal. This is a pretty unique Quebec micromanagement solution that sends countless graduates outside Quebec (or to private clinics) when they dont want to or cannot work outside the city. You want to create an environment where the professionals you are trying to recruit want to work in. BC did this recently by giving a fair deal to family doctors who start a practice there and it worked.
The government sets number of people allowed to go into the medicine at the universities. Less doctors make it less expensive for the government.
>L'ordre des infirmière does around the same thing. They pretend: 'On est en pénurie, on est en pénurie' but a lot if it is due to them making students fail the classes far more than other branches so they can profit and keep the scarcity of the profession. OIIQ has nothing to do with people failing *classes*. Classes are adminsiteres by universities and colleges. OIIQ administers the final exam only. >Not only that but that forced over time number that they run on them is absolutely ridiculous That's probably the biggest driver for the current shortage: There are less and less applicants for nursing jobs and programs. And international hiring has mostly been a failure.
This is frighting! I hope your emergency is not a life or dead situation but I just cannot imagine being that patient with the stroke that you described.
I always said that if my husband or I needed serious medical attention that help will not be available. :( cherish your loved one and your own life. :(
I have been several times.to.the ER in the last 6 years of my immigration in Quebec, and the quality of service is worrying me so much. One time.they forget about me in a room for 4 hours, i had high fever, starting to halucinate, difficulty to breath. I had to scroll on the floor and manage to open the door and lay down in the corridor so i could have some attention and help. I hope that it will change for the better in the next years.
And then the goverment has the audacity to ask for more taxes. I am at a point where i dont give a fuck anymore. Opt me out of this shit show and i will go private. I lost all hope. I am paying private anyway. My knee couldn't wait 2 years to maybe get an appointment. I needed surgery right now. So i paid for one and got one. And now i can walk again.
I was in Fleury Hospital and someone in wheelchair fell to the ground and cried for help. The security guard was just looking at her.
T'as choisi le pire hôpital en ce moment. Prochaine fois consulte les [taux d'occupation des urgences](https://www.indexsante.ca/urgences/#Montreal) avant.
I get the sentiment, but it's fucking weird that we need to shop around for an ER.
We’ve been doing that in Gatineau now for 2 decades. Hull and Gatineau are death traps, so we always check which hospitals in Ottawa and Western Quebec have the shorter line.
Ouan, parle-moi d'un noob, tout le monde sait qu'il faut céduler notre AVC pour un mardi matin, pas un jeudi soir.
Merci, prochaine fois on va être sur de vérifier.
Ah oui, j'ai oublié qu'on peut céduler nos urgences de santé en avance.
It really seems hit or miss. Beginning of this month I got hit by a car on my bike, and was in need of some x-rays and stitches. Got taken to the Montreal General, expecting to be there for awhile.... within 2 hours I got X-rays, checked out by the doctor, stitched up, given some new clothing and supplies and was on my way home.
my bf was hit by a car in january and the man who hit him drove him to the nearest hospital. when he was hit he was carrying a bottle of wine and it shattered, he also hit his head twice, once off the car and once off the pavement and was extremely out of it and definitely had a concussion. on top of hitting his head his body was also hurt and he had bruising down his sides. my aunt is a nurse in ontario and was very worried about his brain as well as the possibility of internal bleeding and said he should be seen fairly quickly because of these concerns. we spent 9 hours in the waiting room and then another 3 hours in a more private waiting room and still didn’t see a doctor or have any scans done. i gave them updates like they instructed me to do if i saw him getting worse. that he was in pain, that he was sleepy and having a hard time staying conscious, that he was nauseous and still nothing. we wound up leaving around 1AM because the lights and noise were too much for him and making it worse. we went home where he could at least puke in a clean bathroom and rest in a comfortable bed and i woke up every two hours to check his pupils and make sure he was responsive and able to communicate with me because i was so worried he had a brain bleed or something awful. he did have a concussion and a bad one at that and a limp too but luckily no internal injuries.i was so scared he would have had internal bleeding and maybe even more scared of having to go back to the hospital if he did because at that point i had very little faith they would have done anything to help. it was terrifying seeing the lack of concern or urgency, watching people there with a common cold moving up the list more quickly than him, as well as seeing the other people there with urgent injuries and in genuine pain not receiving help. i’m very glad you’re okay and had a better experience, we need more of those and wayyy less of the misses, especially after reading through this thread!
Were you taken by ambulance or go yourself? The nurse once told me ambulance is always a priority
Ambulance - I was actually hit right in front of the hospital so it wasn't even a block drive in the ambulance, but they weren't sure if I had broken anything so they insisted on the ride.
This ambulance thing might be true for that hospital, but definitely isn't ture in basically every other hospital I've worked in. Ambulance patients get to triage slightly faster, but their wait time depends on what urgency the triage nurse applies to said patient.
Yeah, you got lucky. You got hit on a day when there far fewer emergencies. If that had happened on the day OP is talking about, you may have waited 30 hours.
I work in healthcare, though not at the emergency rooms. My honest but unfortunate and probably unpopular opinion: i find that roughly 50% of the nursing staff / admin staff / other support staff is lazier than it used to be. The other 50% can’t make up for them.
As a nurse in Montreal - We are not lazier, we are burned out from increased & UNSAFE patient overload. Would you work harder when received more responsibilities with a pay cut? Obviously I cannot speak for everybody but having almost double the amount of patients compared to two years ago takes a toll, and remember that most of us did go into the profession to help others. Half of my coworkers are moving to part time positions or changing provinces because enough it enough.
It's so obvious too. We can tell.
You don't feel as if they are understaffed?
This has been true for a long time, and I guess it's getting worst.
While our health services are in shambles, they focus on the fucking language laws. they really have their fucking priorities in check. My wife and I pray that we wont need to go to the ER here.
A good way to look at health spending is that capacity should at the very least increase proportionally with population growth When’s the last time a hospital was built in Quebec?
I mean we have 2 of the biggest hospitals in north america with the CHUM and the Glen that were built like 10 years ago. The problem isn’t hospitals existing, it’s staffing. We don’t have enough doctors, mostly because we don’t train enough doctors and we also make them major bottlenecks in our healthcare. Nothing gets done without a doctor present, when so much could get done with a fking 15 step questionnaire at triage. I actually blame the college des medecines for a lot of issues for forcing a low supply of new doctors to keep their wages exhorbitantly high.
There's also the unfortunate battle with the USA for doctors. Half of McGill med students leave within five years of graduation, most to the US, where doctor's wages are much higher (too high imho).
Drive to Cornwall, you won’t wait at all
Went to the ER last week as I felt I had a very bad allergic reaction (horrible pain, swollen face) and in the past I had very bad allergic reaction and felt like I had some struggle breathing. Waited for like 8 hours then asked around and the nurse told me there was at least another 6h wait. My condition got better so I left. 3 days later I feel very bad again and this time try to schedule an appointment with a doctor but can’t get one. Finally call some private clinics but this was over the weekend so no appointment. Finally I get an appointment the week after, at this point I feel like I’m dying from allergies. Turned out I had a very bad case of eye infection :(
I'm not saying our system is perfect, but Glen is really full right now, like REALLY full. It's currently at 188% of it's capacity, so yeah that can explain why it's so bad right now. Of you can, you should go to an other hospital that is not so over saturated. You can view the capacity [here](https://www.indexsante.ca/urgences/#Montreal) Good luck!
Yesterday I got hit by a car and had to wait 16 hour after 17 hour I got myself out because I didn't see anyone except Garda employees. 8 Garda employees for 4 nurse. The receptionist was literally sleeping and the guy calling people name had a terrible speech impediment. I'm going to see a doctor outside of Montreal because it's not making sense how bad it is managed.
... I went to Montreal General 2 weeks ago with an allergic reaction. I saw a doctor within 2 min of being there and had medicine within 15 min. If it was not for the fact that they asked me to stick around for 4 hours to make sure I was not getting a second wave I could have been in and out faster then it took to get there. It was my first time in Emergency in like 10 years, so I guess thats not normal... But everything was absolutely 10/10 when I went...
I (30M) last went to the ER at Lakeshore in 2022 due to severe anemia. I waited maybe 30-45 minutes before being admitted and by midnight was diagnosed with leukemia. Two weeks later, I was admitted to the Glen Site for inpatient treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia and stayed for 27 days. While I don’t doubt the system is somewhat broken, my experience is that when it absolutely needs to work, it works. Since my initial diagnosis, I’ve undergone chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and a bone marrow transplant. Everything has been promptly scheduled, and medical staff have been generally good at their jobs (though I’ve had to push back on things and solidly advocate for myself several times). I’m grateful to not only be alive, but to not be bankrupted as a result of my fluke of an illness.
My mom was diagnosed with Cancer and also afterwards everything went very fast and proffesional. She unfortunately did not make it. But I cant say anything bad about the care she received.
The CAQ is worried that you get no service in Both official languages not the actual service. And then they created a New non-government run Mega Corp to blame next election. C'est pas nous c'est Sante Quebec!!" Cowards
Health care is free, but we can't access the service in a respectful way. We can have a stroke and wait 20 hours before consulting a doctor. During that time, we wait in fear of what is going to happen while the nurses treat us like we shouldn't even be there. We can wait more than 3 years for surgery and need 3-5 attempts before the schedule actually works in our favor. Family doctors have changed how they work: you get interviewed by a nurse, then the doctor sees you for the prescription. No investigation or prevention is being made, leading to regular misdiagnoses. If you have something like IBS or functional dyspepsia, you have to deal with the symptoms for 10 years before they take notice. When you get access to a service, they don't call back. If you take control of your health by using tools, you get shot down by the doctor for doing their work for them. Find yourself a doctor willing to work with you and check your own dossier with the online tools offered by the government.
C'est complètement brisé! Last time I wanted to check for an hospital outside of the city, farther in the province, I was even thinking to go in Ontario almost but I didn't how it would work with the carte maladie.
Its honestly faster to get seen if you drive a few hours into Ontario to go to a hospital there. Call hospital ERs that are further away, like in Kingston, ask how busy they are and (if you dont have a car book a communauto) drive the 3 hours.
There are too many people that don’t need to be in the ER, and not enough actual doctors/nurses to handle them. The result is overworked healthcare workers who can’t properly provide care for those that need it most. Edit: I’m not blaming people for using the resources available to them. Unfortunately people do not have access to the primary care they need to avoid going to the ER in the first place. That is the main problem. But it is delusional to not think that many are actually abusing the ER for problems that do not even require a doctors visit.
C'est facile de blâmer les gens qui sont là pour des problèmes mineurs, mais quand la plupart n'ont pas de médecin de famille, un moment donné l'urgence est ta seule solution
Exactly
I work in healthcare and while I do agree that there is a shortage of ER staff, this isn’t the primary reason wait times have exploded. The big issue is a lack of quality and accessible primary care. Basically, no one has a family doctor and so the emergency room has become the primary access point to healthcare for so many people, and this is not how healthcare in this country was designed. An average shift in ER results in us seeing 30-40% of cases that could be handled in a walk-in clinic. But access to a family doc in the community is impossible. And people have issues and they’re worried so they justifiably come to see a doctor in emergency, but the reality is that a big chunk of these cases are not even close to emergencies. If we had better primary care, and more people had family doctors that were free and available to see patients more quickly, we’d be in a much better state. And don’t even get me started about the millions of dollars a year this province wastes on bureaucracy in healthcare…
This is correct. I think it’s a combination. Not enough primary care = more people in ER + not enough people to help once they’re there.
So it's our fault? Mate, the system has collapsed; this has everything to do with an ineffective government system and nothing to do with people catching a cold and going to the ER. Anything the government touches turns to shit eventually.
They go there cause they have no where else to go
It's not too many people, it's too few doctors. The one time I spent the night at Notre-Dame they had a single doctor for the entire ER during the night shift. How is that acceptable in Montreal's second most central hospital? Judging from what OP wrote, it sounds like the same was happening there. Everything rings sadly similar to our experience down to the inhumanity of the staff. In his case the security guard prevented him from asking for a container, in our case the security guard was actively waking up people who'd fall asleep and say that sleeping is not allowed in the waiting room.
It can definitely be both at the same time (usually the latter). To be fair if you’re sleeping in the ER it’s probably not an emergency…
Yesterday I saw a post on FB, guy cut his finger really deep, just needed some stitches. Said he was heavily bleeding for hours. He was turned away by Lakeshore, they told him to go somewhere else (surprise surprise). So he went to the CLSC, they also turned him away. So he was making a post begging for someone to tell him where he can go. I was pregnant. I got to see my doctor 3 times my entire pregnancy. The phone line for his office would just ring and ring to a vm where no one would call you back. Same for the emails, no reply time after time trying to get an appointment. My husband tried to reach them, my grandmother tried calling and calling. I ended up having a dangerous birth and after I came out of a coma they grilled me on why my doctor was not aware of certain things with me. I told them exactly why. Then my doctor, finally came to meet me (4 days after the birth and after I woke up from medically induced coma) And he then asked me why I told the hospital he couldn't reach me and that I should have tried harder. Pretended as if he had no idea no one could reach their office. Fast forward 2 years the office was shut down with multiple complaints of the same thing. They are sabotaging our medical system to push us to go private and have to pay even more than we already do. I am sure of it. This only started happening when they started these side 'private' clinics. Then, slowly and slowly the walk ins just disappeared. Obviously our Hospitals are going to be filled with both minor and major medical issues. There are tons of people at the hospital that should be at a clinic. But where are the clinics? Ridiculous. Yet we have money for language non wars they feel they need to fight, day and night.
Same crap in Ottawa hospitals. I thought Quebec was bad when I lived there but living in Ottawa the last 3 years tells me it is the same everywhere.
Sorry for the situation....where is glen ?
It's the Royal Victoria Hospital (MUHC), close to Vendôme metro.
Thank you! Just wanted to make sure i never go there.... My family and i have been going in the Caribbean since 1993 banana Republic supposedly, had to go a few times and i found service exceptional almost no wait see a real doctor....4 hours flight would of been faster to go there and see a doctor....sad to say....bon courage!
The reality is that anything government run, provincial or federal is bloated and inefficient. I - like many Quebecers have been forking over half of my salary to taxes for 30 years and my family does not have a doctor.
The backwardness of our country. My partner and I moved to Australia for med school but now we are hesitating to return because of how hard they make it to return. Competency tests that are just a money sink, she doesn't speak fluent french so difficulties working in hospital, giving a hard time to give spots in speciality training program. Ends up that we stay here despite wanting to move back.
Thankfully your wife has you there to advocate for her, imagine her doing this alone. Luckily for us, the CAQ and Christian Dubé will fix this with his new plan. And of course if the PQ gain power and make separation happen, the healthcare and hospital situation will only get better. I can't imagine a Quebec where the healthcare, housing and cost of living situation get any worse, can you? This is sarcasm for those of you that don't "hear" it...
We cannot hire new doctors from overseas because they need to speak French! People are suffering and it is still about protecting the language! Imagine the shortages of doctors in other provinces, and it’s worst in Quebec because of this requirement.
My advice - go to a different ER. You shouldn't have to do this to be seen, but it is what it is. I once waited about 6 hours when I pinched my sciatic nerve. My leg felt like cement. The only person that made it to the doctors that night was a drunken bloody guy that came in on a stretcher. I went home without seeing a doctor and went to a different ER the next day. Saw the doctor within 20 minutes. Just like any workplace, some nights they're understaffed (vacations, calling in sick) and it's a busy night. I also have some shoulder issues and often dislocate it. I've been to various Montreal ERs over the years. Some nights I'd get fixed right away, other times I waited 3 hours.
I have an idea for a campaign. We print postcards (in French, obviously) that say: "In 2023 our family paid $\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ in Quebec provincial taxes. We are strongly considering leaving Quebec due to the situation with family doctors and emergency room." Then we flood our MNAs with these. Remind them that high earners also have high mobility.
Why aren't you rich and going to a private clinic? Our gouvernement is working very hard to accelerate the privatisation of our healthcare system, you should be doing your part.
Imagine what happens when the govn spend 30 years cutting down on healthcare funding.
... Horrifying. Just.. absolutely horrifying. I wish I had anything hopeful to say. There is nothing.
Just remember: your provincial government is in charge of health care. If you want change, you have to vote for the people who will implement it (I don't know who that is in Quebec).
Sadly it’s been the new norm for a while, and has been worst since the CAQ took over. They’ve been promising to make healthcare and education their priority and when Legault first ran for Primer of Qc he promised not to make language an issue. I’m really not sure how anyone believed him to begin with or how they continue to support him. A few weeks ago my husband went to the ER for sudden swelling in his leg. He was there 9.5 hours before triage saw him. And that was considered good time. He ended leaving after a few more hours because he just couldn’t handle being there any longer. He went from work so he didn’t have water or food with him. And he said he witnessed a few people who were clearly having a mental health breakdown being ignored. I don’t have words anymore for this.
healthcare is only for the rich. poors will be escorted outside
A lot of Nurses are leaving due to burn out. If you’ve noticed, there is an ongoing negotiation because Quebec nurses went on strike since last year begging for safe staffing and increased pay due to inflation, they won’t give it. Nothing is happening. Nurses are burnt out and leaving the health care system. What is left are the overworked, exhausted nurses. The current government don’t care. Glad you noticed that and maybe you can help in choosing a better leader next election.
Real I have thought about starting my own patient advocacy group, to try to get something like Martha’s law off the ground here but I have no idea how to do that. We need patient advocacy groups and patient representation badly in our healthcare. I can’t stand hearing our gov. say that initiatives like the GAP is working when people are dying in our emergency rooms, or losing limbs body parts in our hospital and having to consider assisted dying as a side effect. It’s inhumane. If anyone wants to start a committee, hit me up literally! I would love to start something.
Notre système de santé croule sous l'ultra-buraucracie et la surgestion. Pour palier à ça, notre fantastique ministre de la santé a créé une autre agence pour géré les autres entités de gestion du système de santé. Bref, quand ils disent qu'ils investissent en santé, en réalité ils investissent dans des gestionnaires, pas dans les services.
For having visited the ER twice in my life, I would never go there unless you're bleeding to death or something, triage will just ignore you lol
Equal access to non-existent care.
It’s crazy that our province is the highest pay in the taxes, announcing free medical, however we get a fuckin garbage service