Recently, there has been a lot of news on the plans of the Provincial Government to cut Healthcare spending in Alberta. Premier Jason Kenney promised before the election that he was not going to do this, as communicated via his Health Care Guarantee announcement.

So if it is true that the Premier is cutting Healthcare spending, then he is not fulfilling his promise. These are all speculations until they actually happen but it would be nice for him to prove his critics wrong.

A recent visit to the Emergency Room in one of the hospitals in Edmonton has me wondering about how efficient our current healthcare system is. Why does it take such a long time for a patient to be seen by a doctor? Talking from experience, we were at the hospital emergency department to get my son’s stomach checked because he felt pain there. He initially ignored it, thinking it might be the sudden change of weather and that his muscles were just probably adjusting to the climate.

But because he felt bad when he woke up in the morning, he came to my room and requested to be brought to the Hospital. Knowing my son, he does not complain for nothing. So we arrived at the Hospital around 7 in the morning and they were able to get a doctor to look at him around 9:45 AM and the doctor then ordered a blood test as well as an X-ray to be done.

It was about 10:30 AM when both the blood test and X-Ray were completed and at around 12:30 PM, the results were in. This was where everything went south. There was about 6 to 7 Charts waiting for the doctor’s attention.

So, the patients were gathered inside the emergency waiting area and no one, including us, were updated on the status. I had to stand up twice to ask the nurses what we were waiting for. There were a lot of nurses and only a few doctors and It took another 3 hours of waiting before the doctor looked at the results of the chart and let us leave. Why the long wait when the doctor could have done this in 3 minutes? What was worse is that some people who were behind us were let go ahead of us.

While I understand the need for more doctors, there must be a better way of doing things. I know that the nurses do triage and assess according to symptoms and knowledge. My question is, if you have the colour coding, how many doctors are assigned to the colour coded list? Is there only one doctor to look after everyone in the emergency room or does each line have an assigned resident doctor? Maybe someone can enlighten me on this process so we can understand the system better for the benefit of Albertans. Because what I understand is this current system has a problem and needs to be more efficient.

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I recently saw Ms. Loida Lumanlan, the Hardworking and Reliable Edmonton Realtor. Ms. Lumanlan expresses that she likes my August 2019 Column. If you have not read it yet, please do. It is available online at www.albertafilipinojournal.com. Thank you Loida. It is people like you that keeps us going. A lot of people ask why I like to write about politics. Honestly, if I can stay away from it I will, but politics is important because it affects all of us. We try our best to present solutions to problems because sometimes when you are inside you do not get to see what is outside. Our solutions might not be the best, but our objective is to help and try to present alternative solutions. So if you have suggestions, or constructive comments, please feel free to send us an email.