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"We are not a Third World Country," Burger tells gov't
Chris Clegg
for South Peace News
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Natasha Burger, I am a registered nurse at the hospital and I am here to speak to you about the effects of government cutbacks on health care in High Prairie.
I have restrictions on what I can say in public. Alberta Health Services has a code of conduct for employees that say I can lose my job if I speak out against my employer’s decisions, and of course, I cannot say anything about individual patients, as I need to protect their privacy. What I can say is the facts as I know them and allow you to make your own opinions.
I started as a new grad here in August of 1992. The hospital looked very different than it does today, and I would just like to compare the services we had then compared to what we have today.
There were 75 acute care beds providing a range of services – obstetrical, surgical, short- and long-term medical, intensive care, palliative care and paediatrics. Today we have 25 acute care beds, but have had only 15 of those beds open since July of 2009, due to staffing shortages. Many of those beds are filled with patients who have long-term, chronic health problems, and there are often not beds available for short-term patients. Those short-term patients now are often treated as day patients through the outpatient department or transferred to other hospitals in other communities.
The outpatient department was staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week and saw about 9,000 patients a year. Today we are still open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but see about 16,000 patients a year – many of those patients who come in daily or several times a day for treatments that they would have gotten as inpatients before our beds were cut. Patients needing care that we cannot provide used to be easily transferred to other hospitals, now there is a critical care phone line necessary to arrange a bed at another community, since there are not many bed vacancies in the hospitals we refer to.
For patients who needed to see a specialist, there were visiting specialists in ENT, rheumatologist, orthopaedic, paediatrician, Internet medicine and an on-site radiologist. No specialists come today; patients must travel to other communities for their specialist to see them.
A full range of obstetrical services – low-risk deliveries, inductions of labour, booked and emergency caesarean sections – were available and High Prairie had about 30 babies a month born here. Now we must transfer out to other hospitals all of our maternity patients, except those that are unsafe to travel if we expect the baby to be born before they would reach the next hospital.
Surgeries were done five days a week and the operating room staff were on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week to provide emergency surgical services and in 1992 there were 468 surgeries and 223 endoscopies performed. We no longer have an operating room in High Prairie, no anaesthetist doctor and no operating room nurses on staff, so today there are no surgeries done in High Prairie.
Long-term care, or what was once called nursing home care, had 50 beds in 1992 and very short wait lists for the elderly needing 24-hour nursing care. Today, there are 35 beds in long-term care and very long waiting lists. The overall age of the population is going up, so the demand for long-term care beds is expected to increase.
Many of the services that were available in High Prairie when I started are no longer available in the community. You decide if we are better served today than 20 years ago.
When there is a disaster anywhere in the world, emergency service agencies rush in with the essentials – food, water, health care and then education and infrastructure support. We are not a Third World country. We deserve to have publicly funded services within our own communities. It is not too much to ask.
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Alberta Health and Wellness Minister Gene Zwozdesky, left photo, listens to a passionate speech given by RN Natasha Burger, right photo at the hospital May 18.
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