Some time ago, people in my neighbourhood noticed that, more often than not, cars were speeding through a local stop sign. Located in front of a primary school, the sign was especially important since students, plus everyone and their dog, used it to cross a busy street.
After too many close calls, residents complained to their MPP, wrote angry posts on the community Facebook page and even enlisted the help of the school’s principal to lean on the powers that be to do the right thing before something terrible happened. They suggested things like police monitoring and installing traffic lights and a crossing guard. Reasons like a lack of money, municipal bylaws, and a shortage of manpower were flipped back in community consultations, then repeated by residents on social media with long diatribes about rights and safety and what on earth do we pay taxes for, complete with orange emoji faces.
But anger and frustration eased into resignation, and as time passed, we accepted what we felt we couldn’t control and made our own individual plans to mitigate risk. More parents accompanied their kids across the street. Some headed in the opposite direction to cross at a designated crosswalk, while others chose what they felt was a safer option and jaywalked between the stop sign and the crosswalk.
Despite the original outrage over not being able to cross the street safely – and yes, we pay taxes to help with that – we did what humans do: we readjusted our expectations, rationalized with unhelpful statements like, “Oh well, everywhere is short of money,” among others.
In the meantime, drivers continued to race through the stop sign.
The thing is, chances of bad things happening increase when we acquiesce in situations where life and liberty is in danger. After all, aren’t they important and sacred enough to make reasons like resource and funding shortages unacceptable? Doesn’t it then become a “fix it at all costs” kind of deal?
Certainly, they are important enough to keep fighting for. But we stopped fighting.
This week, I spent time in the emergency department (ED) with my mom who had complications after having a pacemaker implanted. And if I had a nickel for every time a caregiver or patient jaunted up to the nurses station with an exaggerated smile pasted to their face despite fatigue and worry before meekly asking for some vague clue as to how long they had to wait to see a doctor, I’d be … well, you know.
But this is old news. Canadians are more aware than ever that health-care professionals are understaffed and burned out, and that our hospitals are past any reasonable breaking point. It’s literally all anyone has talked about since COVID. Long wait times, doctor shortages and affordable medicines are also hot topics.
Patients have complained, raged on social media, told our sad stories of loved ones lost in a crumbling system, measured the danger of such a system and seen it play out in countless missed diagnoses, ED deaths and delayed screening time and time again. And yet, here we are, left to acquiesce to a situation that poses us immense risk.
Consider that before landing in the ED, my mom spent two days not being able to stand up without completely losing her breath and gripping her chest in pain, as she waited for a call back from her family doctor because she didn’t want to get stuck lying on a gurney in a hospital hallway for days. A man sitting beside us in the waiting room said he didn’t have a doctor and had been urinating blood for a week before going to the hospital – something he called “a last resort.” He nonchalantly mentioned that he had packed a cooler of food in anticipation of a very long wait. Beside him, a lady who looked to be in her 70s paced back and forth leaning on a worn wooden cane, impatiently using Google to figure out what was wrong with her foot, which was bright pink and too swollen for a shoe. And across two rows of occupied chairs, a young mother holding a baby vomited, spewing something pink all over the floor and onto a nearby wall. Besides a few gasps, no one said anything. Seconds later, the maintenance crew arrived, dropped a yellow “Caution Slippery” sign in the middle of all of it and left, leaving patients and staff to walk around and sometimes through the mess.
Like the stop sign situation, we have tired of – and perhaps gotten too used to – hearing about health care underfunding and staffing issues, so we make do with what we have, shifting into (deadly) mitigation mode (because what else are we going to do), looking for shortcuts and tightly holding the hands of our vulnerable.
That these stories won’t be a surprise to anyone is disturbing in itself. But even more disturbing is how behaviour and perspective is changing to match what health care can and cannot deliver. It’s not OK that health-care professionals are understaffed, burned out and tired, but it’s also not OK that someone thinks it’s normal to pack a cooler of food when deciding to seek emergency care. We cannot forget – or ignore – that this is where we have landed. And we certainly cannot afford to stop talking about it.
After all, when it’s a stop sign that’s ineffective, most of us have the luxury of choosing other ways to get to the other side of the street safely. We make trade-offs to ensure our wellbeing and that of our loved ones, taking the long way around or maybe not crossing at all. But when it comes to health care, there’s no choice, and there certainly shouldn’t be any trade-offs.
