Amid a major outrage over the Canadian healthcare system pushed to global shame following the death of an Indian-origin man who waited for treatment for over eight hours, an Indian-origin physician in Canada analyzed the situation and said on-duty doctors and nurses should not be blamed because they are fighting forest fires with a garden hose. 44-year-old Prashant Sreekumar died at Grey Nuns Community Hospital in Edmonton after coming into the emergency room complaining of severe chest pains. The hospital staff performed ECG and a blood test and said there were no abnormalities. Prashant was made to wait eight hours in the emergency room, where he died. During the waiting period, the family told the hospital staff that he was experiencing debilitating pain, he was not being able to speak and was just fumbling; but the front desk told them that there were others ahead of him with more acute problems. His blood pressure was 210 at that time when the hospital staff said it was not acute. They were also told that they only waited for eight hours and the longest patients waited in the hospital was 11 hours.
‘Don’t blame the front line,’ says ER doc
Raghu Venugopal, an Indian-origin physician in Canada who works in emergency, said the incident is terrible and tragic but the frontline doctors and nurses should not be blamed. “The nurses and doctors on duty can only perform as well as they are supported. If they have no beds, if they are massively overcapacity, if they are understaffed – then they have no hope in meeting any normal benchmark of acceptable medical care. If the ER is a holding area for hospital patients who are admitted but have no where to do – then the ER cannot do its core function of seeing new patients,” Venugopal wrote. “We are sending ER nurses and doctors everyday to fight forest fires with a garden hose,” he added. “Canada – your ER doctors and nurses are telling you – and this tragic case proves it – we don’t have the resources for the job you have given us to do,” Venugopal explained. “Blame the policy-makers, blame the hospital planners, blame the senior administrators and 100% blame the provincial Health Ministers and governments but don’t blame the remaining front-line.”
