Ontario emergency room wait times

I continue to read about hours waiting in the ER rooms in Ontario despite the imposition of the health tax by "liar, liar, pants on fire"' McGuinty. Why do Ontarians continue to elect this Norman Bates lookalike is beyond me, and then complain when he does exactly the same things he did in his last term (little to nothing).

What should happen at the hospital is to have an emergency department and and a non emergency after hours type of clinic co-existing, you walk in, get triaged and sent to the appropriate area. Your health records should be electronic and available there.

The health care system in Ontario is about 20 years or 30 years behind the times. First all the doctors are scattered in private practice all over the city, they should have offices in the hospital. Second, the after hours clinic should be in the hospital, or at least one non urgent clinic. Your health records should be centrally electronically available, not locked up in some doctor's office somewhere, unavailable because it is not office hours or he is on vacation for two weeks. Third, adequate resources should be allocated to emergency rooms, and because there is non-emergency clinic, there is no need to "punish" everyone in order to discourage the "abusers" who walk in with cuts and scrapes.

What you have to do now if you are injured or feel a chest pain is to decide if your illness/injury can wait and phone your family doctor, if you are lucky enough to have one, and lucky enough to get one in less than a week, and if it is the doctor's office hours, not his day off or a weekend. If not you have to figure out if it it the hours of an after hours clinic, becuase the 1-2 hour wait will be better than the 2-6 hour wait at the emergency. None of the previous? Well you are stuck going to the emergency, where they have no files on you. The police can pull me over in the middle of the night on a rural road in the middle of nowhere and know all about me, but the health care system cannot do the same. Whose ass is being protected? Certainly not the patient's. Anyway i digress, but if you were that smart in figuring out how sick you were you would not need a doctor.