I am only 16 years old, and I don’t know much about the medical system or the politics surrounding it all. What I do know, however, is that it’s pretty wrong for my mom to be sent home 5 minutes after a major surgery on her leg, and have to crawl on her hands and knees up the 4 flights of stairs in our home, all because the hospital didn’t have enough beds for her to stay overnight in.
My mother had surgery on September 30th at the Chilliwack General Hospital. This surgery was booked at least three months prior with the specific requirement of having to stay in the hospital overnight because of complications in several previous surgeries. Right before they rolled her in to surgery the staff explained that there were no beds in the hospital available that night. My mother was told that she could cancel the surgery and book another time a few months from then and hope that beds were available or that they could go ahead and she could go home afterward. She chose to go ahead. Now, I know my mom is okay, but the whole thing makes me question the system.
“Everything is free but nothing is readily available” is an old saying about the former Soviet Union, the first country to have free healthcare as a right for all written into its constitution. The same can be said for Canada. The inability for the Canadian system to provide basic equipment, let alone new technologies, contradicts “free healthcare”. Its costly for people who need help sooner rather than later yet have to wait an average of 17 weeks for surgery, or 12 weeks for an MRI scan. Government funding from both the Federal and Provincial levels need to invest more money into a more efficient healthcare system. Canada as a whole is indeed mostly secure under our rights to healthcare, but there are many unstable factors that unbalance the system. We need help when we ask for it, and not just in life or death situations. More funds from the provincial government would help hospitals achieve this. Even if people would stand up and fundraise, anything that anybody can do would help a lot. We need it. No person in Canada, no matter what class or status they have in society, should be made to have to crawl on there hands and knees because our hospitals couldn’t provide a space for them to recover in.
Chloe MacKenzie
Sardis