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Hello, dear Broadview readers,
If it hasn’t happened to you, it’s happened to someone you know or love. An interminable wait in an emergency room, or rushed or incomplete medical care.
A Toronto resident shared on Twitter this week that they waited a day and a half in the ER to receive surgery for acute appendicitis.
“Staff are clearly doing their best. Some of them are doing two people’s work,” they wrote. “This can’t be good for anyone. How can we fix this?”
The strain on health-care systems across the country has several causes. In Ontario, a critical shortage of nurses is only one of them. But it’s a big one.
“In these challenging conditions, the burden falls on nurses to juggle larger workloads under extreme duress,” writes Kingston, Ont. nurse Debra Lefebvre.
Not only do shortages affect the quality and timing of care that patients receive, she writes, but they also impact nurses’ mental health.
You can read more of her reflections, including where she finds hope, in this piece here.
Tell me: Are you a nurse or are there nurses in your family? How are hospital staffing shortages affecting you or those you love? Do you have ideas for how to improve the situation? Email me at e.prestwich@broadview.org.
Thank you, as always, for reading Broadview.
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