I've listened once again to Theresa "Dawn till Dusk" Oswald's comments to CTV about the Concordia Emergency department sending a 38 year old woman suffering a ectopic (tubal) miscarriage 19KMs away to the Grace Hospital for surgery.
I still can't decifer what she was talking about- because it certainly wasn't the incident in question.
Tory press release:
NDP SURGERY CUTBACKS PUT PATIENTS AT RISK
“A dangerous practice that will end up killing patients”: Winnipeg physician
A Winnipeg doctor says Manitoba patients are at serious risk because of the NDP government’s decision to cut back emergency surgeries at three community hospitals.
The decision to cancel after hours emergency surgeries at Concordia, Victoria, and Seven Oaks hospitals was made public last year after an internal WRHA memo was leaked to Progressive Conservative Health Critic Myrna Driedger. Patients who require emergency surgery after-hours will have to be transported to the Health Sciences Centre, St. Boniface or Grace Hospital.
A physician, who fears job loss or other professional repercussions for speaking out, wrote to Driedger with serious concerns for patient care. Driedger spoke to one distressed and frightened patient who presented at Concordia Hospital’s emergency room with severe abdominal pain.
Physicians discovered that she had an ectopic pregnancy that was at imminent risk of rupture and required immediate surgery. However, because after hours emergency surgery was unavailable, the patient had to be transported across the city to Grace Hospital as both Health Sciences Centre and St. Boniface Hospital were already backed up with emergency surgeries. According to the physician, had the ectopic pregnancy ruptured en route, the patient would have died in less than five minutes.
Driedger said when physicians speak out about patient safety, the Minister of Health should sit up and take notice.
“Doctors are saying that is an unsafe practice,” said Driedger. “It looks as though the Minister of Health has made these cutbacks without assessing the very real risk to patients. If she’s looking to save money, she should cut back on the WRHA’s bloated bureaucracy, not front line patient care.”
Driedger added the Minister’s failure to announce these cutbacks publicly is another example of the NDP putting spin control ahead of patient care.
“The only reason Manitobans even know about these cutbacks is because one front line health care professional was brave enough to make an internal memo public,” she said. “It’s unfortunate the Minister of Health doesn’t think Manitoba patients deserve to know what’s happening under her watch.”
The Health Minister realized her previous policy of duck and hide was only going to land her in a parking lot ambush spitting out her gum on camera again, so she spoke about this case to CTV:
OSWALD: " The statement in the release that there are no emergency surgeries going on in our community hospitals is false, it's factually untrue, and doctors assure us that in those rare cases of general surgery where it isn't safe for patients to be moved, that arrangements have been made and are made, to ensure that a surgeon comes to them."
I have searched high and low and cannot find where the Tory release said a word about "no emergency surgeries". The problem is with after-hours - i.e. late-night - emergency surgery being cut. In that regard, what the Minister herself said was itself, "factually untrue".
And CTV.ca provided the proof:
Health Minister Theresa Oswald says the information is not accurate, saying that emergency surgeries have not been consolidated at the hospitals in question, that it was only the general surgeries that have been reduced after hours in three hospitals.
Oswald says the changes were made in conjunction and after consultation with doctors and surgeons.
This past summer the WRHA announced it would consolidate after-hours emergency surgery, and say the move was made in part because of a shortage of surgeons...
Marilee Caruso ended the broadcast story by saying "acute surgeries are now only done at the HSC, ST B. Hospital, and the Grace Hospital."
Maybe this is a game of semantics. After all, this is the same teacher-turned politician who has redefined "transparency" and "courageous" to encompass the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority conduct in the Brian Sinclair emergency-room death and the after-market acceptance of brown envelopes from winning bidders.
It appears that in Oswald's world there are 3 kinds of surgeries - "general", "emergency" and "acute".
Acute means emergency, and general might also mean emergency if the surgery required is general and not acute. And after-hours means past dusk. By her statement, an ectopic miscarriage must be general and not an emergency.
Yet by any definition it is an emergency. An acute emergency. An after-hours acute emergency in this case.
Just not to Oswald.
Maybe she was expecting that no one would pay attention to her actual words; that all the media would do is run a sound-bite her claim the opposition doesn't know what they are talking about, and hope that all the public would remember was "she said there were still emergency general surgeries at the hospitals and Driedger got it wrong" (and forget about the after-hours part). Maybe, as one sceptical listener pointed out, Oswald knew exactly what she was doing, and what she said may all be true about general emergency surgeries and doctors coming to patients - - all true except, of course, for the part about the Tories being factually incorrect about what happened to the pregnant woman.
Which they weren't as we have a copy of the letter from the doctor.
As we pointed out yesterday, even if Oswald believes what she said, that emergency surgeries are still being done after-hours - does she really think a surgeon will magically show up at a hospital if/when a patient is too sick to be transported and start to operate on the patient WITHOUT AN ANAESTHETIST?
Oh ya, sedating the patient must be a minor detail in her world.
(Did someone say something about needing nurses to assist the surgeon?)
Under Oswald's watch, the WRHA has failed miserably at solving the problem of a shortage of surgeons, anaesthetists, and nurses. The cutbacks that risked a pregnant woman's life are the direct result of those failures.
This is the same leadership that, while a St Boniface Hospital therapy program that uses clowns to help sick kids ran out of funding, steadfastly refuses to reveal what the WRHA spent $2.2 Million in "undirected" brown envelope slush money on.
When that program gets cancelled, Oswald will once again say, oh no, the critics are all wrong, it wasn't government funded, etc..
And she'll be correct. There will still be plenty of clowns in the health care system. Transparent, courageous ones who work from dawn til dusk in service of the public. For the pregnant mothers, the kids, the indigent like Brian Sinclair... but we won't be laughing.
