Quebec hospital ERs showing ‘real improvement’, Dubé says
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The number of Quebecers waiting in hospital emergency rooms with respiratory illnesses is on the wane, Health Minister Christian Dubé said Wednesday.
“We’re not out of the woods yet, but there is a real improvement,” Dubé said at the two-day planning session of the Coalition Avenir Québec caucus in Sherbrooke.
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Dubé said the most recent statistics provided by the Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ) show a real decrease in the virus’s progression.
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“Just before the holidays, we had 1,000 daily visits to the emergency room. It climbed to more than 10,000, and yesterday, it was down to 8,900,” Dubé said. “This is good news; we have to remain prudent, but I’m encouraged by what’s happening at the moment.”
More than just luck, Dubé credits the improvement to the “enormous amount of work that was done by our teams.”
As an example, at the Anna-Laberge hospital in Châteauguay, “some mesures were changed, and it resulted in an improvement over the course of two weeks.”
Last month, two patients died at the hospital’s overwhelmed emergency room. One of those patients died while in the waiting room, La Presse reported. As of Wednesday, the average wait time for someone on a stretcher waiting for treatment was 18 hours.
In the meantime, there are now 14,180 Quebecers waiting for a surgery for more than a year. Dubé promised last May to reduce that number to 2,500 by the end of the year, the number it was before the pandemic began.
His objective is for the list to be down to 7,500 by March, which would nearly cut the list in half in the span of two months.
“Surely, the strike days had an impact on the catch-up rate,” Dubé said. “We knew that would happen. But I continue to speak with the heads of the health authorities every three days and they say they will spare no effort to ensure the timetable is respected.”
In May, Dubé said he wanted to optimize emergency rooms and reopen those that were closed and offer employees the chance to work overtime on a voluntary basis on nights, weekends and holidays. The government also plans to use private clinics to help clear the backlog.
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