Nurse practitioner says there are ways to reduce hospital wait times

A local man who works for the Meadow Lake Tribal Council as a nurse practitioner and who spent time working out of the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert said he sees ways that wait times can be reduced, following a recent release of wait times by the provincial NDP.

Manuel James now works as an independent contractor for MLTC and delivers care virtually from his home base in Prince Albert.

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As a health care practitioner who also has worked in his home country of India, James said that Canada has room to improve.

“I think we can do much better here compared to other countries because we have more manpower compared to the population ration. We have more money, we have more infrastructure, and the best way is to use every professional for their full potential,” he said.

Nurse practitioners, for instance, are trained to do much more than other types of nurses and can diagnose some illnesses.

A few years ago, James was part of a pilot project in the emergency department of the Victoria Hospital.

“I was able to see many patients who are waiting there to be seen by a physician who are not in very critical condition,” he said.

“I could choose who I want to see, and I saw them and they went home earlier.”

Because he knew the limit of his ability to treat, he would find the waiting patients that he could diagnose, treat and send home while doctors focused on people with higher needs.

The pilot program ended and so the service no longer exists, but James would like to see it tried again somewhere and possibly have it in every community.

Canadian health care availability revolves around the idea of the provider’s schedule rather than the patient, he said.

In India it is the opposite so despite having few doctors per capita than Canada, people get treated more quickly.

This could take several forms such as not requiring appointments at medical clinics and allowing patients to directly access specialists rather than needing to be referred by their general practitioner.

“In India, they have minutes to hours waiting time only, in the emergency room or to see a specialist,” he said.

People that have a sickness of some sort and want to seek medical advice often end up waiting until the condition is extreme if they know they will have to wait a long time to see a professional. This holds true for accessing lab services, he said.

James has worked across northern Saskatchewan, including in Cumberland House and in northern Alberta and B.C. in multiple Indigenous communities so he has seen this firsthand many times, he said.

He thinks that territorial professionalism is playing a factor in what professionals are allowed to do and reducing that will go a long way towards eliminating wait times.

According to secondstreet.org (a website that tracks Canadian wait times), almost 23,000 people died in Canada last year waiting to see a specialist or to have a procedure done.

That number is estimated to be low because some provinces did not participate in the data collection survey.

Another beneficial change would be to exclusively pay through public funding and not use fee for service. Fee for service allows doctors as a private entity to bill the health care system by the procedure performed.

A doctor as an employee will not do things like prevent patients from bringing up more than one health concern during an appointment, as has happened in the past.