To make health care better, we must hold on to our rage

We have perhaps gotten too used to hearing about health care underfunding and staffing issues. But we can't afford to stop talking about it.

Mar 25, 2025 by Lisa Machado

This week, I spent time in the emergency department (ED) with my mom who had complications after having a pacemaker implanted. And if I had a nickel for every time a caregiver or patient jaunted up to the nurses station with an exaggerated smile pasted to their face despite fatigue and worry before meekly asking for some vague clue as to how long they had to wait to see a doctor, I’d be … well, you know.

But this is old news. Canadians are more aware than ever that health-care professionals are understaffed and burned out, and that our hospitals are past any reasonable breaking point. It’s literally all anyone has talked about since COVID. Long wait times, doctor shortages and affordable medicines are also hot topics.

Patients have complained, raged on social media, told our sad stories of loved ones lost in a crumbling system, measured the danger of such a system and seen it play out in countless missed diagnoses, ED deaths and delayed screening time and time again. And yet, here we are, left to acquiesce to a situation that poses us immense risk.

Consider that before landing in the ED, my mom spent two days not being able to stand up without completely losing her breath and gripping her chest in pain, as she waited for a call back from her family doctor because she didn’t want to get stuck lying on a gurney in a hospital hallway for days. A man sitting beside us in the waiting room said he didn’t have a doctor and had been urinating blood for a week before going to the hospital – something he called “a last resort.” He nonchalantly mentioned that he had packed a cooler of food in anticipation of a very long wait. Beside him, a lady who looked to be in her 70s paced back and forth leaning on a worn wooden cane, impatiently using Google to figure out what was wrong with her foot, which was bright pink and too swollen for a shoe. And across two rows of occupied chairs, a young mother holding a baby vomited, spewing something pink all over the floor and onto a nearby wall. Besides a few gasps, no one said anything. Seconds later, the maintenance crew arrived, dropped a yellow “Caution Slippery” sign in the middle of all of it and left, leaving patients and staff to walk around and sometimes through the mess.

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