Roughly a year after Alberta Health Services announced days with possible physician shortages in the Chinook Regional Hospital Emergency Department, department doctors are sharing with the Lethbridge community the current situation through a letter released at the beginning of the month.
The letter which is written from the Emergency Medicine physician group at Chinook Regional Hospital in Lethbridge says unfortunately the shortage announced last summer has continued, and since last summer has impacted five to 15 days a month since last summer; this means there has at times been only one doctor working.
“Since early May, we are short at least one doctor every day, and we’re facing the possibility of being down by two doctors on many days in the coming months. This could mean a 30 per cent reduction in available doctor hours compared to what we aim for,” the letter reads. “Based on past experience, being short one doctor on a busy day can mean that wait times for less urgent cases could be three to four times longer.”
According to the letter wait time which used to be a two-hour wait, at times could be upwards of eight hours.
CRH ED Doctor Sean Wilde tells mylethbridgenow.com this is a concern they have raised in the past it is an issue that has persisted and gotten worse.
“This is related to our difficulty in recruiting full-time physicians over the last few years, in conjunction with retirements or people leaving, which, you know, happen all the time as well,” Wilde says. “We’re concerned it may be getting worse in the coming months.”
Wilde adds the letter from the department doctors is aimed at raising awareness and also sparking action within the healthcare infrastructure.
“I think [the government] could probably do a little bit more and be a little bit more involved. We’ve already seen them reaching out a little bit more than they have been in the recent past. It’s not a bad idea, I think, to get the community involved as well.”
According to the doctor, he hopes that sharing this information with the community will also encourage people to help with doctor attraction. Citing other communities that are facing healthcare crises, some of the solutions have been led by community members.
“Sometimes just spreading the message like this more in public also puts it on the radar of physician colleagues around the province or the country who will sometimes, you know, be able to point some people our way. So it has a lot of different potential effects that we’ve seen and that we’re hoping could lead to some benefits down the road.”
As well Wilde and the letter state the longer wait times that patients experience and the fact their healthcare is compromised weighs on physicians and nursing staff as they feel increasingly helpless to prevent it. He says it also adds increased stress during a shift because doctors are working harder and have a harder cognitive load.
“Medicine is complicated and it’s easy to make mistakes if you’re not focused. – The more things we’re trying to do, the more balls you’re trying to juggle at once in the air, the more likely something falls to the cracks which can lead to harm to someone. So that causes a lot of stress for us because we don’t want that to happen. We don’t want to be responsible for that.”
The letter from the ED physicians says that the shortage is not something just seen in Lethbridge, but is being seen across the country, with Alberta seeing a decline in the number of physicians choosing to practice in the province. Ongoing political instability and loss of the previous Alberta financial advantage are cited as reasons for this decline with smaller cities such as Lethbridge facing more difficulties in attracting doctors, especially when larger cities are also struggling and actively hiring.
Before ending the letter by thanking the community for their understanding, the letter reads, “We’re also supporting new training programs for physicians in our area. However, time spent training new doctors can further reduce the number of doctors currently available to work shifts.”
