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Ian Lindsay, Canwest News Service

(Hospital hallway) (FPinfomart: Allowed, Canada.com: Allowed)

Every time I visit a hospital emergency room in this country I wonder afresh why we still cling to our obsolete public health monopoly. There is no better argument for a parallel private health system than the gurneys that line the corridors of our ER departments, each containing a patient groaning out his testimonial to the inadequacies of medicare. Someone should tour the country's emergency rooms, surreptitiously filming this army of the prone, then upload the footage on to YouTube during our next federal election campaign. After a few million hits, private medicine would no longer be Canadian politics' third rail.

My latest run-in with the system began a few days ago when I showed up at Toronto East General Hospital with an infected, unbendable left knee. It was late at night and, to my surprise, the place was almost empty. In a mere 10 minutes, I was dispatched to the Minor Treatment ward, whose waiting room contained just a few patients. An hour later, I was lying on a hospital bed, intravenous clindamycin flowing into my right arm. If you fall ill in East York, midnight is apparently a pretty good time to do it.

It was when I came back the next morning for my second intravenous treatment that the emergency room assumed the form most Canadians recognize. The place was packed, and all but the most acute cases were made to take numbers upon entry. Only after your number was called were you permitted to actually explain your problem to a nurse and go off to wait in another room for treatment. According to the nursing staff, a typical wait-time that day was four hours.

Assuming you bring something decent to read, and your medical condition is bearable, the ER wait itself is not the worst part. Rather, it's the sad sights you take in while you're there: people in real pain; haggard parents trying to pacify their terrified kids; confused old men and women who lie fretting on their gurneys, losing their dignity to the onlooking public, waiting for a son to drive in from the suburbs to hold their hand and take them to the bathroom. Many people look like they're at the end of their rope. But they sit there waiting because that's what the nurse told them to do. And besides, this is an emergency room. Where else is there to go?

Sometimes, things get ugly. As I waited last week, a middle-aged taxi driver with a thick Slavic accent angrily asked the nursing ward-boss why he couldn't get his number then come back for treatment a few hours later, so he could collect fares in the meantime. The nurse, a veteran with a commanding Irish brogue, told him that's not how things work, and that he'd lose his place if he left the building.

I felt worse for her than for him. Presumably, she went into nursing so she could heal people. Yet here she was, spending her days barking instructions at surly immigrants and delirious seniors like some kind of reform-school dragoness.

Then I began to think: How much would I pay to avoid all this -- to not take a number, to not be ordered around, to avoid this diorama of misery?

It's not an entirely theoretical question. On Friday, a privately owned facility called the False Creek Urgent Care Centre opened its doors in Vancouver. Originally, False Creek was billed as Canada's first private cash-for-treatment emergency room -- a place where middle-class people like me could pay for prompt treatment and then spend the rest of the day at work or with their family, instead of reading a Stephen King novel and breathing in other people's germs in a hospital waiting room.

Unfortunately, when the media got wind of the plan, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell staged the predictable public freak-out and forced False Creek to adopt a conventional public-payer model for all but a few discretionary services. In keeping with the Soviet-style spirit of our health system, B.C.'s government proclaimed legislative amendments that would permit the province to close the place down if the owners made good on their original private plans.

We all know what kind of horror would unfold if False Creek were allowed to operate a truly private emergency-room service, don't we? People with some money to spare would plunk down their Visa cards and get fast, dignified service. This would help empty the waiting rooms at hospitals like TEGH, which means my Slavic friend wouldn't have to waste half his shift in a hospital waiting room. And that Irish nurse could go back to taking people's temperatures instead of yelling at them.

Aren't we lucky that politicians like Gordon Campbell are here to protect us from that nightmare.

Illustration:
• Colour Photo: Ian Lindsay, Canwest News Service / (Hospital hallway)

Idnumber: 200612050130
Edition: Toronto
Story Type: Column
Note: jkay@nationalpost.com
Length: 793 words
Keywords: EMERGENCY SERVICES; HOSPITALS; BACKLOG
Illustration Type: CP

PRODUCTION FIELDS
BASNUM: 4673591
NDATE: 20061205
NUPDATE: 20061205
DOB: 20061205
POSITION: 2