Kennedy Column

Tina Kennedy Reporter

Healthcare minus humanity equals business

Why, asks Pam Lauck, is it that when she called the local hospital for help, as her baby niece suffered from a nose bleed, they refused to talk to her? Why did they tell her to call HealthLink and then tell her to look the phone number up in a phone book?

That's what happened last week as Lauck, spending a week with her family before she headed back to Edmonton and university, babysat her young niece.

The niece, sick with a sinus infection, woke up with a nose bleed. Lauck and her mother knew there was a lot of blood but nothing they did was working.

The more they did, the more upset the baby got and more she bled.

Lauck did what she's always known to do, she called the local hospital.

When she did, she spoke to a nurse who told her she couldn't help her and that she'd have to call HealthLink.

HealthLink is the province's supposed answer to all those people who continue to do what Lauck did: call their local nurse or doctor for advice.

It costs the healthcare system and with HealthLink in place they hoped to loosen up resources to place elsewhere. Essentially, it meant less people were required to be on staff at various hospitals across the province.

Peace Country Health gave HealthLink a bit of a blitz when it first came on board.

In all honesty, HealthLink is a great idea. Someone is sitting at a phone with all sorts of emergency information and willing to help.

But what happens when you make that call for a child you're babysitting and they refuse to help you?

That's what happened to Lauck. For 23 minutes she sat on the telephone with someone from HealthLink answering questions.

Once the worker found out that Lauck wasn't the mother, but the aunt, she told her she couldn't help her.

"What's going to happen when my sister goes back to school and she has a babysitter?"

Good question.

Even bringing a child to an emergency room, they're required to give life saving treatment if a parent is not immediately available.

Did the HealthLink operator think she couldn't give emergency first aid information to an aunt who was caring for her niece because she didn't have the parent's permission.

It's not like there's any technology that would prove Lauck wasn't the mother. She told the operator the truth.

Lauck's frustration goes much deeper than one phone call.

It's too much that every time you need healthcare locally you have to go elsewhere-physically or via a fibre optic line. There were better services here 10 years ago, says Lauck.

If you had a question and weren't quite sure what to do, you could easily call the local emergency room and get the advice you needed.

Lauck is absolutely right. The push to make healthcare sustainable has drained it of any humanity. It's down right paradoxical when you think of why healthcare came to be-caring for those in need of it.

It's a business and they're liable for what they might tell you. Never mind that their professional responsibility to provide you with healthcare should be first and foremost in their actions. Instead, the talking heads have prevailed and politics has become an every day part of healthcare provisions.

Those who don't know will. One day they'll call for help or bring themselves to the local hospital only to find out they no longer have one-at least in terms of human care.

It's time to take business out of the equation, says Lauck. Make healthcare what it always was, a caring profession.