At a health town hall, patients see nuance even as they endure pain

“I sat there for five hours waiting in severe pain. One doctor was on. He was working his ass off.”

This man’s account of his trip to the emergency room at Yellowknife’s Stanton Territorial Hospital was representative of several experiences recalled by residents who attended a healthcare town hall meeting on Thursday evening.

Patients in the NWT’s healthcare system described long waits, a lack of staff, and an overarching frustration that the care they need often seems to be out of reach.

This account of Thursday’s meeting forms the second in a series of articles examining issues in the Yellowknife and NWT healthcare systems. At the foot of this article, you can find a link to the first in the series, which covered physicians’ concerns that they are barred from meaningfully advocating for their patients.

“It’s hard to be told you have to wait or we don’t have an answer, because this time is really valuable to me,” one woman said through tears.

Residents at the town hall, organized by Yellowknife MLAs Robert Hawkins and Kieron Testart, broadly spoke to outline similar concerns and ask how coming to the town hall and talking would help the situation.

There are committees to examine this, they were told. There is the chance of a third-party review of how NWT healthcare is managed. The federal auditor general could feasibly be called in.

All of those things take time.

“By the time they get it settled,” the man with the five-hour wait said, “I’ll be out in the cemetery.”

Thursday evening’s two-hour meeting at the Baker Centre was attended by roughly 100 people, more than a dozen of whom spoke. Hawkins and Testart provided short responses and occasional explainers. Both are regular MLAs, meaning they can bring people’s concerns to health minister Lesa Semmler but can’t make healthcare decisions themselves. Semmler was not present at the meeting.

‘Everyone wants the system to succeed’

About a dozen healthcare workers attended in person, two employees said as they browsed the room. The town hall was understood to have been broadcast for healthcare staff via private stream.

Concern that speaking out could lose people their jobs – a concern voiced by some doctors this week – resulted in a briefing about the GNWT’s employee code of conduct before the meeting began. A union representative was in the room. Few healthcare workers took the microphone.

Instead, the meeting largely heard from people worried that the NWT’s healthcare system is backsliding, the level of care they are used to has fallen away, and it’s not obvious how the system will recover.

Officials have repeatedly pointed out that Canada as a whole faces similar strains and a fight to find enough staff to keep services going, or to meaningfully reduce waiting times.

“You know what? I don’t care about down south. I care about Yellowknife. We’re all sitting back taking second-grade care when we don’t need to,” said Faith Embleton, the organizer of a recent petition regarding what she says is the inadequacy of the territory’s healthcare.

“This is not an incentive to keep me here, and it’s not an incentive to keep many people here.”

The majority of the audience were seniors, though some younger faces were in the room. Some speakers identified themselves as being from other regions of the NWT.

Overwhelmingly, speakers heaped praise on the individual healthcare workers who help them but questioned the government’s broader approach.

“My heart goes out to the medical caregivers and the people in a position where they can’t really speak out,” said Julie Thrasher, the first to speak after an introduction from the MLAs.

“I stand behind these people and hope the GNWT steps up … and puts the medical care system back into their hands.”

“By comparison to a lot of Canada, we do get some big handouts,” said a woman identifying herself as Janet. Most speakers used their first names only, and Janet listed benefits related to the likes of hearing aids and glasses as perks she appreciates in the NWT.

“I’m very appreciative for what I do have in the North, but there are so many areas that need to be looked at,” Janet said.

“This is nothing to do with the doctors up here that are running around in circles trying to help us. It’s just that they don’t have the time, we don’t have the staff.”

“The staff are to be commended. They do approach this with a lot of commitment and a lot of care, and it’s too easy to lose that in the wash,” said a resident who identified himself as Keith.

Asked by Keith how politicians would fix the issues and how concerns heard at the town hall would be transmitted to the territorial government, Testart told him: “We are blaming the problem, not the people, and that’s really important.

“Everyone in their heart wants the system to succeed and has to deal with a certain set of challenges. We need to break down those challenges and figure out how to solve them.”

Are managers underpaid?

Not everyone saw the situation that way.

“I keep hearing that these healthcare issues are not caused by people, it’s not a people problem. But it is. It’s people who are making these decisions,” said a woman identifying herself as Joanne.

A woman named Karen described having to go to Yellowknife’s emergency room simply to be seen by someone, “but if we had family doctors we could get reasonable appointments in the same week – we wouldn’t have to do that.”

“Get us more family doctors,” she said, “and use emergency for what it’s supposed to be used for.”

Two healthcare workers who listened to the meeting and discussed it with Cabin Radio on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals if they spoke publicly, said that while feedback from patients was valuable, a separate conversation driven by healthcare professionals was necessary. The problem is that they were unsure how to have that conversation without leaving themselves open to being accused of violating the NWT government code of conduct.

One worker said the issue of pay, raised by multiple residents on Thursday, was “overrated” compared to the billing it is often given by patients and politicians.

“We are one of the highest-paying places in Canada, so it’s clearly not the main issue,” they said, a message that conflicted with a portrayal of the NWT by some residents as a place falling behind in terms of the pay it offers people.

Instead, the healthcare worker said one solution might be to pay the managers more. Some leadership positions, they said, appear “severely underpaid” for a healthcare system in apparent crisis, and that results in “a lot of people turning down those offers.”

“Real change could come from having conversations with the people on the ground,” one worker concluded. “But we can’t talk.”

‘They have to hustle’

There were light-hearted moments among the serious concerns voiced by residents.

For example, one woman imploring the MLAs to ensure the territory’s medical records are upgraded – to be compatible with Alberta’s system and readily available to patients – added, to laughter and applause: “If you can go to the dump and access somebody else’s medical records, you should be able to sit at your computer and read your own.”

By contrast, other residents made plain that the territory’s healthcare issues can result in more than inconvenience or heated tempers at the clinic.

“I’ve got permanent nerve damage because I ‘waited too long.’ I didn’t wait too long, I was forced to wait too long,” one man told the room as the evening reached a close.

He said he had ultimately resorted to private healthcare in Alberta, a decision that had secured him an MRI scan in two days after an extended wait through the territory’s public system.

“I’m sorry if I piss people off when I say private healthcare is something we should look at,” he said. “We really need to explore cutting these wait times down a lot.”

Testart told the audience regular MLAs have made healthcare a “top priority” as he tried to reassure them that by turning up, their voices would be heard.

“We’re not trying to be alarmist,” he said, “but we are trying to sound the alarm so we can start moving forward, instead of playing catch-up to a problem that we know is steadily eroding the quality of life northerners have enjoyed for a long time.

“If you care, they have to care,” he added, referring to the minister and her staff. “And they have to hustle.”

Also in this series

August 22: NWT restrictions on physicians leave patients ‘really vulnerable’