Health Care in Vancouver, Canada

The system has declined significantly over the last 20 years. People cannot find family doctors and must rely on walk-in medicine, which is OK for average illnesses. But for children the wait time to see a specialist, especially when they are in crisis, they have to be admitted to hospital. But whoever sees them in hospital will not be the one who does their follow-up. Once released,, they can wait weeks for follow-up which can put them back into crisis and they need to be readmitted. Release is not based up on follow up availability. Globalized care where there is a small group of medical staff following a patient, no longer exists. An individual receives 20 minutes of attention at best. So all the is addressed is the presenting symptom, not the cause.

I am a therapist and had a spinal cord patient released from rehabilitative hospital as he had completed his in patient work. But all therapy had to cease for 6 months as the wait-lit for out patient therapy was that long. He was in the middle of learning how to walk again.

It is this lack of continuity that is seriously problematic.

Looks like everybody elses experiences in the medical care institutions are far better than mine. My wife gave birth here and we have to deal with other relatively minor needs for medical care and there was rarely a situation when everything went ok.

We need an endoscopy now and after 3 months of waiting we got the appointment 7 month in thew future..... how is this normal? We needed other tests that were refused several times and then they turned up to have been necessary. If we need to talk to the family doctor, the appointments can only be in 1-2 weeks time.

In emergency sections in hospitals the waiting time is 3 hours in average.

A colleague at work called for the ambulance after he broke his arm and they said he was 7th on the waiting list...... waiting list for ambulance?!?!?!?! and then we drove him to the hospital where 3 ambulances were waiting while the drivers were chatting and drinking coffee..... maybe there are things about the ambulance service we do not know but it looked very bad!

I have been living here for 5 years and anybody I talk to, even people born here are complaining about these same things..... but they think it is "normal" because it is cheap....

I am from Romania and in Romania these are not happening. There are other bad things with the system there but not like this!