Andrew Battison has been an emergency room doctor at Calgary’s Foothills Medical Centre for almost seven years. He loves his work, but lately he finds it to be crushingly hard. The waiting room, he says, is much more crowded than it was even a few years ago, packed with people who don’t have family doctors and who treat the ER as the gateway to the medical system. Battison is seeing patients with conditions that are often advanced because they haven’t been able to get an appointment with a family doctor.
In a wrenching piece for Maclean’s, Battison says he’s “overworked, understaffed and demoralized” by the state of health care in Alberta. He has joined 190 fellow emergency room health-care providers in signing an open letter asking the Alberta government to increase its support of the health-care system. “We’re backlogged,” he says, “because our primary care system does not have enough staff and beds to take care of everybody. There are thousands of sick people without family doctors who have nowhere else to go.”
—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief
