Calgary Health Care

[Full Mountain]

Since the construction thread is getting a bit derailed on this

Also to add:

A relative had a minor stroke in the last week and I have a few observations of the system:

1. While recognizing that having specialists traveling across the city on any regular basis is not desirable, having a patient across the city from friend and family who live in proximity is a challenge.

Case: Primary stroke treatment is based out of Foothills, but my relative lives 10 min from the South Health Campus. Having her treated at the south hospital allowed for her friends and husband to have relatively easy access to visit her in the hospital, where as if she had been transferred to Foothills (as she would have with a more severe stroke) they would have to drive across the city. Further complicating this is the fact that her husband can no longer drive (as a result of the stroke she can't for the immediate future either).

2. Lack of staff resulted in her staying in the hospital at least a day longer than required. She required a EKG and since the staff wasn't available (not sure why) she ended up having to stay overnight. This resulted in a bed being used when it shouldn't have been.

3. She was placed in what was designed as single room, that has two people in it. Cuts to the system will only make this more prevalent.

4. Urban design of our cities has created what will only become a bigger problem as Baby Boomers age, when they are no longer able to drive themselves. We are either going to have a significant number of SDH's coming on to the market or are going to have to find transportation alternatives for these people to get to their day to day needs. The last number of decades of planning is going to come back to bite us in a big way in the next 10-20 years. Including that many of our communities were not designed for transit and now have inefficient routes resulting in underutilization of them. Our primary measure of independence in our city is driving, if one can drive they are independent, losing that ability is the first step to losing the rest of your independence as you become more isolated due to the inability to interact outside of walking distance. Whereas if one is able to get out through other means (transit, etc.) it dramatically increases their mobility.

5. In a separate interaction with the system, test results for a number of blood tests monitoring medications levels were not reviewed by the clinic at ACH. Why this occurred I'm not sure, but then end result was that we had to inquire with them to identify that they hadn't been reviewed and they then identified that the medication level could be lowered.

Ideas:

Virtual presence may allow for some specialists to be centralized while still supporting teams in remote locations.

Overall proper staffing of our healthcare system is required.

Our cities need to be designed in a way that ensures people are able to fulfill their basic needs without the requirement for vehicle transportation.

Retrofitting our suburbs with transit roadways (cut throughs, etc.) that allow efficient routing will increase options for those who can't or choose not to drive.