Health-care access lacking

The fundamentals of universal health care are so precious to Canadians we can practically recite them along with the words to the national anthem.

Access to health care is based on need and not ability to pay, and a person who becomes ill will be looked after no matter where they live.

Yet, in Atlantic Canada, the fabric of universal health is experiencing some fraying.

MEDEVAC ISSUES

Last month, Alyson Beaudoin was left terrified by inequalities in the system when her fourweek-old baby Aly contracted RSV while visiting family on the Labrador-Quebec border. Beaudoin took her seriously ill child to the closest hospital, which was in Quebec, where staff told her Aly required a medevac to St. John's, N.L.

As Aly struggled to breathe, Beaudoin waited an excruciating 22 hours for a flight.

“If it weren't for the Quebec team at Blanc Sablon hospital, my daughter would be dead right now," she said. “I watched my daughter dying in front of me.”

Beaudoin's account echoes that of Brynn Tucker, who was also four weeks old on Feb.

10, 2020, when she was suffering from RSV in Labrador and required an emergency flight to

St. John's. That medevac took 36 hours to arrive while distraught parents Matt Tucker and Amber Coffey had to hold a respirator mask to the baby's face to keep her breathing.

Four years later, and Brynn is a healthy preschooler, but the access to health care in her community is still broken.

“I watched my daughter dying in front of me.” Alyson Beaudoin Parent

LONG WAIT TIMES

Labrador is unquestionably geographically far from health-care centres, as are many port communities around the province. But even in relatively closer-flung communities in Atlantic Canada, getting care takes far too long.

Despite its tiny geographical footprint and small population size, Prince Edward Island was found to have the worst health-care access in Canada in a recent Statistics Canada study.

Roughly a quarter of P.E.I. residents have no primary care provider and rural hospital ER closures are common. Even the hospital in the city of Summerside has had no acute care coverage since May 2023 due to staff shortages.

Those health-care staffing issues also plague Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In a 2020 New Brunswick auditor general report, ambulances only arrived on time half the time to some rural 911 calls. A similar problem in Nova Scotia left patients waiting up to two hours for an ambulance in 2023, and it was then a further 10 hours getting into the hospital.

A recent report by an IWK emergency physician also found that the further a child was from a major hospital when experiencing a major trauma, the more likely they were to die from it.

INEQUAL CARE

All of these examples point to a system that does not equally care for residents, putting them in peril of more complicated illnesses or even death.

Centralizing equipment and staff to ensure the best care at the biggest centres will only work if there is a more efficient way to transport rural patients to those centres. Otherwise, the health care offered is not really universal.