Inter-provincial healthcare

WVoices of Experience

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My two cents

Moneca Jantzen Editor

hen I was a young person, I discovered how different things could be from one province to another. When I was 13 years old we moved from Ontario to Alberta. Still too young to grasp how our great confederation actually works, I was rudely introduced to an entirely different school curriculum midway through Grade 8. For example, straight A’s in French in Ontario withered to a miserable 40 percent in the same subject in Alberta. Go figure! My adolescent self didn’t really understand why things were so different from one province to the other in the same country. (We shouldn’t mention the time my 5 year old self asked my parents if we were back in Canada yet (meaning Ontario) following a trip to Quebec! Huge faux pas of course, but out of the mouths of babes, what did I know?)

Fast-forward a few years and I found myself back in Alberta answering a phone call from a collection agency. They were telling me that I owed hundreds of dollars for a brief hospital stay in Quebec following my return from Africa while on a youth exchange. This same scenario happened a second time due to an emergency room visit in Toronto as an out of province student at Trent University. Back in the 80s, no one told us we should have extra health coverage for travel within Canada. It was frustrating and strange to me that one province wouldn’t seek payment from another and was involving me in the transaction after the fact. These were both clues to me that our provincial governments were not as cooperative as we’d like to think.

As an adult and as someone who has had the privilege of having lived in or visited most corners of this nation, I have a better understanding of why our provinces and territories demand control of certain aspects of our lives, but I do wonder if there is a better way to provide certain services; perhaps not education, but certainly healthcare. Surely there are more commonalities than differences in this realm, as well as regional strengths and weaknesses.

Recently and quite interestingly, for my first foray into healthcare since my doctor retired last June, I needed a requisition for a routine test recommended by the BC Cancer agency. The local walk-in didn’t seem to be a timely option so I had a go at a virtual set up in a local pharmacy. It turned out to be a decent experience and a speedy one.

I am grateful that the option was available. What surprised me the most was that the doctor is actually located in Ontario. A follow-up call for some recent lab tests and he even called me at 5:30 p.m. PST which would be 8:30 p.m. his time. Superlative service!

The CBC National recently had a panel that included a man who had traveled to Lithuania to get a knee replacement. He argued that the time and money spent to find an alternative made more sense than languishing and waiting at home dealing with terrible pain and not being able to be productive and work. He had a point.

Few Canadians want to see a two-tiered medical system where the have-nots end up getting inferior or no care, but the simple fact is, some people will find the care they need IF they can afford it. While I’m not an expert in anything, let alone medical care, it seems to me that if I can have a virtual visit with a doctor in Ontario for basic healthcare, why can’t we evolve a federal system where people can get their knee replacement or their gastric bypass or their quadruple bypass heart operation in a neighbouring province if there is the expertise or availability rather than heading all the way to Lithuania or elsewhere? Obviously we still need basic care wherever we live, but maybe the duplication of services and bureaucracies across the country is an issue, especially with a dearth of doctors generally. In our own province we apparently have 64 vice-presidents across all of the health regions. Is it really necessary to have such top heavy administration when our system is crumbling? How many of them are doctors that could be busy doctoring instead of shuffling papers and having meetings?

There seems to be so many negative things happening with the system right now and as a mere patient and resident of BC I can’t help but wonder if there are better ways to get things done. I remain flabbergasted that no previous government anticipated the healthworker drought knowing that all those baby boomers would retire and start aging and getting sick at the same time.

I hope the powers that be figure it all out. As an individual, all I can do is try to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible and not be a drain on the system. I guess in the meantime, if I have to talk to a doctor in Ontario, I will.

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