Several months ago, Chelsea Van Dyk woke up around midnight in intense pain. Nurses on the 811 hotline told her it wasn’t an emergency, but that she should go to a walk-in clinic within 48 hours to be treated. The closest walk-in clinic to her home in Hinton was in Edmonton, a three hour drive away.
“I called back an hour or so later because I was peeing blood and was in agony,” she told TheRockies.Life. This time, she was told to see a doctor within 24 hours.
She couldn’t take the pain. But it was the middle of the night and there was no doctor at the Hinton Healthcare Center.
Desperate, she decided to go anyway. “I thought at the very least a nurse could maybe do something to help,” she said.
Van Dyk was lucky. At around five a.m., just as she was about to leave, the pain died down. Doctors at the Hinton Healthcare Center would later tell her that she had passed a kidney stone. She only waited about an hour and a half to see a doctor, and they gave her a treatment plan to prevent and address any possible future kidney stones.
No doctors
A year ago, Hinton declared a local healthcare crisis because of a critical shortage of doctors, nurses and other medical staff. The provincial government is responsible for funding health care, but the municipality put up $1 million over two years to keep its primary care clinic open.
Still, for months residents of Hinton have consistently been without an overnight doctor in their ER. The town also doesn’t have enough general practitioners.
Van Dyk’s story is one of many. One man who had a heart attack was first told to go to the clinic instead of the hospital. Eventually he was airlifted to Edmonton. Another woman says she’s waited two years to be assigned a family doctor. Many patients are traveling to Grande Cache or Edson to see a doctor. Others are using online services like RocketDoctor or Maple, which often make money by selling their users’ data to advertising companies.
Federal leadership needed, doctor says
Leigh Beamish has practiced medicine in Hinton for over ten years. The town’s $1 million investment allowed her to stay.
She chose to practice in Hinton in part because of the supportive community she found there. “If there’s a sick patient or a bad car accident with multiple sick people, I always know that if I pick up the phone, anybody who’s in town will be right there to help out,” she told TheRockies.Life.
Still, she worries that the lack of medical care in town is forcing people to leave Hinton, or to choose not to move there.
She’d like to see more leadership both at the provincial and at the federal level to address the shortage of doctors in rural Canadian towns.
“There’s really a void in terms of a national strategy to address rural health workforce issues,” she told TheRockies.Life.
“There’s some pretty easy wins there, things like Pan-Canadian Licensure so that physicians can work anywhere in Canada, and supporting pathways for internationally-trained physicians to get through immigration processes.”
Provincial government responds
The town met with West Yellowhead MLA Martin Long and with health ministers many times in the last year in efforts to address Hinton’s healthcare crisis.
In an email to TheRockies.Life, Kyle Warner, Press Secretary for the Ministry of Hospital and Surgical Health Services, outlined several programs that the government has launched in Hinton since the crisis was declared.
The $16-million Rural and Remote Family Medicine Resident Bursary encourages doctors to move to remote areas to practice medicine.
The new Virtual Emergency Physician Program connects clinical staff in a hospital emergency room with a doctor via phone or videoconference to treat patients with non-life-threatening concerns.
“We recognize that Hinton’s health care system is currently under strain, and we are actively working to address these challenges through several initiatives aimed at strengthening the health care workforce,” Warner said.
West Yellowhead MLA Martin Long did not respond to TheRockies.Life’s questions about what he was doing as an MLA to improve Hinton’s access to health care.
Too little, too late
Hinton residents still struggle to see a doctor despite the recent investments.
Chris Gallaway, the Executive Director of Friends of Medicare, says that Hinton’s healthcare crisis “shows a lack of critical leadership” on behalf of Alberta’s Ministry of Health.
He told TheRockies.Life that the ministry has responded to a province-wide healthcare shortage with “pilot projects and one-off type responses.”
“It’s missing the mark on what’s needed,” he says.
Despite a growing population, Alberta hasn’t meaningfully grown its health care services in decades.
Furthermore, many doctors have decided to head to other provinces due to poor work environments and a government that too often tells them what they can and cannot do in their practice.
According to Galloway, the province needs to go beyond news headlines saying they’re working on a solution, and come up with a detailed plan to recruit and retain doctors.
“Geographically if Hinton can’t recruit doctors, then we have a problem,” he says, noting that Hinton is less than an hour from Jasper and Rocky Mountains. “If they can’t find doctors, what hope does the North have?”
