Patients in British Columbia’s Island Heatlh region are the most likely to walk away from an emergency room without seeing a doctor.
That’s one of the takeaways of new data highlighting just how much pressure the province’s ERs are facing.
According to the provincial numbers, 142,000 people walked away from B.C. hospital ERs before they received treatment.
The number was highest in Island Health, where nearly 30,000 people gave up on waiting.
The data was obtained by the opposition BC Conservative Party through a freedom of information request.
“We know people are leaving ERs because of long wait times — but we hadn’t any idea how many,” said Courtenay-Comox MLA and opposition critic for rural health Brennan Day.
“Certainly, the numbers we got back reflected what British Columbians have been telling us and that’s ERs are in crisis here in B.C..”
The data shows that B.C. ER walk-aways are up 86 per cent in the last six years. In the Island Health region, the increase is a staggering 160 per cent.
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“We need a change in culture, I think, in the health authorities more than anything,” Day said. “We need to start prioritizing front-line patient delivery versus protecting the system for the sake of protecting the system.”
In a statement, Island Health said it has recently launched a website where people can track estimated emergency room wait times.
It added that it had recruited almost 1,800 net new employees last year, including more than 800 nurses.
The B.C. Nurses’ Union questioned those figures.
“I would ask, how many have left? How many vacant lines do you actually have in emergency? What is your percentage of emergency qualified nurses? Because I think there is much more to understand the context of the situation,” union president Adrian Gear said.
“This isn’t just an Island Health concern — this is a provincial concern.”
Gear said B.C.’s emergency rooms have become a “pressure cooker” in part because so many people don’t have access to primary care in the form of a family doctor or nurse practitioners, and end up relying on ERs when they get sick.
Health Minister Josie Osborne was not available for an interview.
“The number of patients leaving the emergency department is a small proportion of the total number of visits,” she said in a statement.
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