“Ah, Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a Main B Bus Undervolt.”
That’s what Apollo 13 mission commander Jim Lovell said after an oxygen tank blew and disabled his spacecraft’s electrical and life-support systems.
He said it in that famously deadpan NASA voice, not wasting any air screaming that they were 200,000 miles from Earth hurtling towards the Moon without enough oxygen to get home.
I was reminded of this scene as I spoke to Yukon health-care professionals about the crisis in our system.
They are fact-based, rational folk. And they say factual things — alarmingly factual things — like “the surgery delays are so long that by the time people get to the [operating room] their cancer is much worse.”
The difference between Apollo 13 and our health-care system is that the Apollo 13 crisis was a surprise. Our health-care system’s descent into crisis is so well documented, it would be like NASA sent the crew into space even though they knew Apollo 13’s oxygen tank had been dropped in the factory the year before and members of the crew had published multiple letters about it in the New York Times.
The letter that prompted this column was one to the editor from legendary Yukon surgeon Dave Storey in August. If what Storey says is true, it is a terrible indictment of the people who run the Yukon health system and our hospital.
He mentions “endless complaints from clinical units without beds,” “record-breaking wait times and daily cancellations” and “destroyed morale.”
He went on to say that “last week there were 14 admitted patients in our wonderful new ER facility that were hospital patients, not emergencies. For just 14 new patients, our minor procedure room had to put people in the hallway because the short stay beds were so clogged with in-patients, the cataract patients of the day had to be dealt with in the hallway and our cast clinic had to be moved to the emergency department because there was simply ‘no room’.”
When word got out that I was writing a column about the health-system crisis, more health professionals reached out to me to confirm Storey’s point of view. (I am keeping their names confidential as one of them told me government officials have retaliated in the past against health workers who spoke publicly.)
One told me to read Storey’s letter, except not the one from last month. The one from 2016. Back then, he was already talking about cancelling surgeries due to lack of beds. Overcrowding and staff shortages were so bad, he said he had “literally seen our wonderful clinical nurse leaders crying out of exasperation.”
Another said things have gotten worse since Storey’s first letter. This confirms my own research. Back in 2022, I wrote a column entitled “Time for an awkward conversation about [health care] rationing.” In 2023, I wrote about how the Yukon’s “find a family doctor” service, launched in 2019, had by mid-2023 reached a waiting list of 3,402 people even though it had been changed to “find a family doctor or nurse practitioner.”
One doctor sent me the Yukon Medical Association’s open letter to the Yukon government from August 13. The subject line was blunt: “Yukon’s health care system in crisis.”
Like a radio transmission from Apollo 13, it calmly states the alarming facts: “more than 17 per cent of Yukoners lack access to a family doctor,” “41 per cent of our current family doctors plan to close their practices in the next five years,” and “Yukoners languish 16 to 21 months on a waitlist for hip and knee replacement surgery” versus a recommended benchmark of 6 months.
Three health professionals also told me how staff at the hospital are dismayed to read Yukon government press releases they think are obviously untrue.
One sent me last week’s press release entitled “With Yukon government support, surgical services at Whitehorse General Hospital have increased.” They described this as “untrue and perhaps actual gaslighting,” adding that all that was changed was nursing schedules so that evening emergency cases did not require overtime. “There is no actual change” in the time doctors can operate.
Another called the press release “blatant lying,” adding that we still have “only two real operating rooms and one small closet for minor procedures.”
This puts the citizen in a difficult position. Should we believe Yukon government communications or people we know working at the hospital?
This whole situation is deeply puzzling. The Yukon government gets vast amounts of money from Ottawa. Even the most neophyte political advisor knows that voters routinely list health care near the top of their priorities.
Yet somehow the Yukon government has decided other priorities are more important. Since Storey’s 2016 letter, Yukon government spending has gone up $680 million per year. That’s a 55 per cent increase. Meanwhile, spending on Health and Social Services has only gone up 31 per cent.
And that 31 per cent doesn’t even keep up with combined population growth and inflation. You would need a 51 per cent increase to do that.
Which gets us to another puzzle. Are the people running our health care system really this oblivious to population growth, surgery cancellation statistics and doctors stopping people in grocery stores to share depressing health-care anecdotes?
Or do they know the facts, but are just doing their job starving the health system so other departments have bigger budgets for all the other spending initiatives you read about in the paper?
Storey is neither a management consultant nor a political analyst. But he hit the nail on the head when he wrapped up his latest letter by saying “I urge you, readers, to insist on change.”
It has taken us years to get into this situation, going back to the 1990s decision to build a new hospital that was smaller than the old one. It will take a long time to fix the problem, and it will take so much money that other departments will need to tighten their belts.
Having observed the Yukon government on this file since Storey’s first letter in 2016, however, I fear things will have to get a lot worse before they get better. And Yukoners will need to scream a lot louder about waiting lists.
In the meantime, I suggest you don’t get sick. Or if you do, that you have the means to go Outside for treatment.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.
