Why politicians should sit in the ER

“Don’t let me just die in here,” groaned an elderly woman dressed in a pink sweatshirt as she leaned against her daughter. Another woman caressed the face of a loved one lying on a stretcher in front of triage. Friends and family walked in and out, with hot cups of coffee, concern etched in their faces.

Just another day at an emergency room.

ERs are places where no one wants to be. With wait times at eight and a half to nine hours, no one comes here unless it is, well, an emergency. Tempers are high because everyone is sick and hurting or worried about their loved ones. Time stands still as you sit for hours waiting.

Waiting to be seen. Waiting for test results. Waiting for next steps. Waiting to leave.

While our premier has spent his time asking that the LCBO hand out brown paper bags, I have visited the emergency rooms of two Toronto-area hospitals three times over the last few weeks.

My friends, our health care is in shambles and our governments, both provincial and federal, aren’t paying enough attention.

I give a lot of grace to healthcare workers who often go out of their way to make us comfortable and get us well during the most stressful times of our lives, but where’s the grace for the patients who sit for hours in waiting rooms? Who are getting the runaround and working through reams of red tape when looking for help?

We are rarely at our best when we’re visiting the ER. It’s certainly not exciting like TV shows and movies make it out to be. It’s stressful. And during the most stressful times in our lives, we’re grateful for the help of health-care workers — but folks are frustrated.

While sitting in the ER for a good couple of hours this month, I heard the distress and anger of people. Granted, there will always be people who fret about everything, I had to feel for the people who legitimately felt like no one cared about them or their loved ones.

This is the hard part: the doctors and nurses do care. They do want to help people. So, what is the problem?

More than two million Ontarians don’t have a family doctor — the first line of defence. Without a primary care doctor, how do people get the help they need? They go to the ER. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier Doug Ford announced a $3.1billion health-care deal to increase access to family doctors, reduce backlogs and add more health-care workers.

Cool. Let’s see this money in action. Thanks to two recent decisions by a provincial arbitrator, Ontario hospital workers will receive a six per cent wage increase — a good start.

I challenge Trudeau, Ford and Ontario Minister of Health Sylvia Jones to drop by an emergency room and have a chat with the patients and the people who are there. We can write as much as we’d like, but until you hear the stories from the mouths of the people, it’s all just talk or numbers on a page.

When you see a grown man, cradling his elderly mom — who is suffering from heart failure — beg for a stretcher so she can just lie down, the story is real. When you hear the young woman and her father talk about her rapidly losing weight and being ignored — but now a mass has been found. You understand her fear and her story becomes real.

At some point, each of us will need the health-care system. Something will happen and we will look to the people in our hospitals, from the cleaners and PSWs to the nurses and doctors, for help. We can’t continue to ignore health care and hope for the best.