From here:
Earlier this month, 82-year-old Ontario woman Doreen Wallace was walking out of a hospital in the Niagara Region when she had a fall, literally in the hospital’s front door. She cut herself badly and fractured her hip. If you’re going to take a tumble, you have to figure that a hospital’s main entrance is a pretty good place to do it. Not so, as it turns out — the hospital refused to admit her, claiming that the hospital could only treat her after she’d been attended to by paramedics. Call 911, they were told, and wait for an ambulance.
As if that’s not bad enough (and it’s plenty bad), after her incredulous son made the call, the woman had to wait almost half an hour while an ambulance was brought in from another region. None were available locally, even though three were already at the hospital where Ms. Wallace had her fall! While people are understandably shocked at the thought of an injured woman laying in a hospital going untreated due to a bureaucratic requirement, the real scandal is that not only was a precious ambulance assigned to this task, but that none were available for 28 minutes.
First of all let me say that my experience with Canadian health care has been moderately good: I haven’t had to resort to calling 911 very often, but when I did, the response was quite fast. In fact, recently, it was so fast, I had two policemen appear on my doorstep even before I called 911 (the phone line was faulty and making calls on its own, apparently). After searching the house and casting an expert eye over my wife in search of bruising, the officers left with the satisfaction that comes from a job well done – to my chagrin, they never did say evening all.
Secondly, the ambulance episode doesn’t surprise me that much. When my father-in-law fell in his retirement home, the resident nurse was reluctant to help him up because it wasn’t part of her job, although she did manage to struggle to the phone to place a call to us. We drove to the home and, after delivering a brief but concentrated barrage of caustic sarcasm (well, that was me mostly), my wife and I picked him up ourselves.
Thirdly, it’s time for 82 year-olds to develop the respect for bureaucracy that it deserves: remember, when you fall down and break something it’s not about you, it’s about the process and metrics and making sure that the God-forsaken Kafkaesque nightmare you are about to enter has had all humanity extracted from it – in order to serve you better.
him to breath. The hospital refused and will remove his breathing tube Monday, which will cause him to choke to death. The hospital’s reason for not doing the tracheotomy – which the courts upheld? It could cause infection or pneumonia.