For years our healthcare system has been broken. Everybody knows it. Crumbled under debilitating hyper-centralization and exhausted staff, it is also on the way to losing its soul, its humanity, its heart.
And that is what is most serious.
Meanwhile, Quebecers who end up being well cared for count themselves lucky.
Others take their troubles patiently. Others, better off, rush at great expense to the private-private sector. All at $52 billion in public funds a year…
However, nobody fights in the buses on the subject, as they say. No protests either.
Not even in 2020 when in the midst of a pandemic, thousands of frail seniors were dying alone in CHSLDs in atrocious conditions under the distant gaze of the mega-CIUSSS.
Have we then become a docile people again? However, voices are beginning to rise. Those of families whose parent abandoned in an emergency corridor or elsewhere in the network was also left there to die in the most unjustifiable of indignities.
In the media, they sound the alarm. Do we only hear them? In recent months, however, the stories of abominable end of life have multiplied.
Patients in great pain who have been denied palliative care worthy of the name or even a clean room for minimal privacy. Patients and families insulted by staff. Etc.
Canary in the mine
Isolated cases or the tip of the iceberg? In our aging society, let’s say the canary in the mine.
One of these voices is that of Michelle Bourassa. At the beginning of the year, she recounted the infamy of the last days of life of her mother, Andrée Simard, in a Montreal hospital.
Ms. Simard was also the widow of former Premier Robert Bourassa, the true father of health insurance in Quebec. A discreet woman by temperament, Ms. Simard had only given the hospital her maiden name so as not to receive preferential treatment.
Result: according to her daughter, the medical staff refused her palliative care and left her in terrible suffering for three days.
In his heartbreaking testimony published in The Press, Michelle Bourassa also says she was insulted by staff when she asked to relieve her mother and give her a room alone. Which, granted in extremis the last day of his life, was unsanitary.
Since Michelle Bourassa’s testimony, other families have been sharing similar accounts of unworthy deaths in various hospitals on social media.
Assisted Dying Champion
The newspaper reported yesterday the abominable death of Mrs. Gilberte Gosselin, 86 years old. Died in Lévis in the emergency room corridor of a hospital.
Insulted even by an attendant, left in her stool, without water or food.
Her daughter and her granddaughter, present with Ms. Gosselin “until her last breath”, denounce what they describe as a “toxic climate” and “totally inhuman”. The key word here is “inhuman”.
In the Montreal Gazettejournalist Aaron Derfel also reveals the existence of several suspicious deaths in the emergency room of the Lakeshore Hospital, including even a suicide.
In January, in these pages, I also sounded the alarm about the erosion of empathy towards patients caused by the crisis which, in the Quebec health network, has lasted too long.
This erosion is not yet widespread, but it could become so if at the top of political and union power, nothing is done to remedy it on the ground.
Meanwhile, Quebec has become the champion of requests for medical assistance in dying. Who is really surprised?
This silent dehumanization of the network and the flagrant lack for years of palliative care at home and in hospitals are perhaps not unrelated either.