To the Editor:
There have been several inflammatory letters to the editor regarding our physician status in Creston including unsubstantiated rumours. What you don’t see with your eyes, don’t witness with your mouth. My fear is if we keep this up we are in danger of losing more of our physicians.
I have worked in a medical office for the past 20 years and I understand how difficult it is for patients to lose their family doctor because they have retired, become ill, moved or passed away. One proposed solution is for the physicians in our town to give us more of their time.
A physician’s day starts the same as your own. They get up, get the children ready for school and go to work. Starting at the hospital they do rounds on all of their inpatients and then head to emergency room to do minor procedures then head to their office. After a full morning of seeing patients, checking lab and diagnostic test results, reading consult letters, taking calls from specialists, phoning pharmacies, returning faxes and calls from nursing homes, and taking calls from the hospital nurses’ station and hospital lab, they have their lunch. This time is usually spent quickly having a bite to eat hunched over a computer or a stack of charts doing more paperwork, returning phone calls or attending a meeting. They may fit in a house call, go the hospital to see a patient or head to a nursing home.
The afternoon is much the same as their morning. When the last patient has left, they will then spend another hour finishing up paperwork. If they are lucky, they can go home to their families — or they could be on call in the ER, in which case they head straight to the hospital to see patients late into the evening or early hours of the night. Our emergency department has a doctor on call every minute of every day, requiring a commitment of at least 70 hours per month per full-time physician. When a physician is sick or hurt they must either cover the shift themselves or rely on a colleague because closing the ER is not an option.
To the person who asked the question why doctors in our town are not willing to just put in a bit more time to see orphaned patients as it would not be a free service, I would suggest that it is not about the money, but it is, however, about the time. Should these physicians just tell their kids that they cannot come out to watch their hockey game or attend a parent-teacher interview? Should they tell their families they won’t be home to tuck the kids into bed? How much more time should the physicians take from their families to give to the community?
Our physicians have chosen Creston because of the lifestyle and their commitment to our community. There are many vacancies in B.C. where physicians would not be required to do ER, maternity, anesthesia or surgery. All of our physicians make sacrifices to provide this community with the best health care they can. What do we say to those that leave their spouses and children at home so they can work nights and holidays in our hospital or to those that work when they are ill or tired or just plain burnt out to keep healthcare going in our town? I think it is time we showed our physicians and their families some support and thank them for choosing to live and work in our community.
Shirley Parent
Canyon