Health

My daughter is only 8 months old and she got very sick over the last few days. Fever went up to 40°Celcius; she had no appetite for either eating or drinking; also her behaviour wasn't very alert. Our family doctor's office is closed on Fridays and because of her high temperature I decided to take her to the ER department at the big, new hospital. 

The emergency room was full of people; literally, there was no empty seat in the waiting room. We signed in and waited for her name to be called for vitals check. Unfortunately, we weren't very lucky, because even after waiting for over 2 hours we still couldn't get her vitals checked and enter triage. She was too tired and her fever was going up, I decided to take her home for some nap and medicine. We left the hospital feeling very disappointed, because we have a very nice, big and a new hospital and yet service was too slow. 

I don't know if all over Canada the health care system is like that or not. It made me want to write about the Mongolian health care system. 

The capital of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar and it has two kinds of Health Care Systems, Public and Private. Visiting the public or private hospital is the patient’s choice. Public hospitals have three sections; Emergency, Ambulatory and Patients who are admitted and stay in hospital.

Emergency Department takes only patients delivered by ambulance and attends to them immediately.  They work from 8:00am to 5:00pm. Ambulatory has almost all the departments and doctors, such as, optometrists, pediatricians, audiologists, internists, dentists, x-ray technicians, ultrasound technicians, etc.

Patients who visit the ambulatory section don't have to wait so long like here in Canada. They stand in the line for which department or doctor they want to see.  Also people back home in Mongolia usually don't visit the doctor's office when they have regular cold symptoms. Everything goes pretty fast in both public and private hospitals. Sometimes, if at a public hospital, the laboratory test takes too long people will choose to go to a private laboratory.

I saw many people who seemingly just had a cold and wanted to see a doctor at the Emergency department in Canada, which made me think that the Emergency Department loses its meaning. Waiting time is fully dependent on how many patients are in the waiting room and how many doctors are available inside.

When those doctors at the ER see people who caught a regular cold, the real emergency needs people have to wait longer in the waiting room. Here everything requires a report or a bunch of documents you need to sign which seems time consuming and takes very long.

I heard that if a hospital won't fill the full documents and keep detailed records they can get sued by the patient so they are afraid of legal hassles and hence will take precautionary measures to document everything. I can understand this fact, but it could be done much better than this and quickly where patients are attended according to the seriousness of the illness and given priority to those who are seriously ill.

What was most surprising was that when I decided to leave the hospital with my infant they had the time to make me sign on the paper saying "Parents decided to leave the hospital", but instead if they used that same time to help me and to get people get into the triage it would have been more meaningful.

If Canada has a shortage of doctors or nurses, the government should support high school graduate students to choose those professions or make a good propaganda or even give better support to those who have chosen these professions already.

Well, this was all my thoughts when I had a high fever, weak, vomiting and less than a year old baby in my lap at the hospital waiting and waiting for my turn until I just got fed-up of waiting and returned home hoping that my daughter would be okay and recover without any treatment at the hospital.