Treatment at Chinook Regional Hospital was professional
By Lethbridge Herald on July 8, 2023.
Editor:
After spending nine days in CRH I feel I should report my very good experience.
I went into Emergency early in the morning. By luck there were only a few people. I was registered and waited a short 10 minutes to be called in for triage.
Testers, vitals were taken, blood draws made and an interview done where it was explained to me what was being done and why. All. this in a very proficient and friendly manner. About 2 p.m. I was told I was going to be admitted when a bed could be found.
When I arrived at 4B about 6 p.m. very friendly and accommodating staff got me settled in.
My stay was made as pleasant and comfortable as possible by a professional – always smiling and accommodating group of people who at times were under pressure with being short-handed.
Many blood tests, scans, X-rays et cetera were done through the course of my stay. I as always kept up to date on why and how. I might say as well the food was pretty good.
We should be thankful for these professional people, always pleasant and caring in spite of AHS.
I wonder what AHS will look like after MLA LaGrange, the new Health Minister, gets finished with it – especially after two plus years of messing with education.
L. Droste
Lethbridge
12-11
So, forever grateful, but maintain the snideness of an NDP voter. Maybe she will get rid of those 50000 paper shufflers the NDP hired.
I guess buckwheat can’t wait to see her destroy your healthcare system like she did the education system, right? How come Lethbridge has over 43,000 people without a family doctor or could it be they are leaving because of what these Reformers, backed by buckwheat have done to us?
Maybe all of you had better read these articles;
“Doctors Who Left Alberta Nearly Tripled Over Pre-pandemic” 568 according to records. Add that to our recent amount’
” AB Saw It’s Largest Drop Physicians Registrations in Last Quarter ” an additional 275
Yet here we have fools like buckwheat making an ass of himself and helping Reformers destroy what out hero Peter Lougheed created for us and is too damn dumb to understand what it will do to us seniors down the road.
Saying you are waiting for the UCP to destroy the system while praisng the very system the UCP have in place shows the bipolar logic of the NDP ” thinker”…..
Why over 43,000 people w/o a Doc? I dont know…ask your socialist comrades in BC how they have matched every resident w a Doc? oh…right..they haven’t because its a world wide problem ….
Keep up the comments buckwheat….people like FEDC can only attack the speaker w comments like ” fool” and ” ass” because their crticicism of the SUBSTACE of your message is nothing but empty blather…
Proof that an empty can makes the most noise comes from those who cant justify their own thoughts and have to resort to ” read this article” or ” check this blog” to bolster their partisan rants….
BTW Fed, newsflash..your hero passed away a long while back, the world has changed….nostalgia has its place….policy and planning for the future is not one of them.
If Klein has been dead for so long and we should just forget what he did to us , like you want to do, how do you explain why we are still short thousands of doctors and nurses, we have the highest property taxes in Canada, the highest power bills, the highest vehicle registration fees, the highest long term health care fees, the highest liquor store prices, the highest driver licensing fees, and have a $260 billion orphan well cleanup mess, and growing as oilmen state, to content with and you don’t care what it’s doing to our children’s future ? It isn’t hard to understand why true conservatives call you losers Traitors is it? Deliberately helping these Reformers put us in financial ruin without an ounce of intelligence to help us try to stop them, like Edmontonians have done, so don’t come whining to us when you can’t get medical help when you need it, like we saw under Klein. We estimate that Albertans have been cheated out of $975 billion and the savings accounts in Alaska and Norway prove it, don’t they?
The hospital staff does a great job.
Praise the staff, and not turn this into a mean-spirited political punching bag Some people are simply political shills.
They are wonderful and doing the best they can. I was in 4 different hospitals during 8 times in Edmonton over a four year period and had 4 different operations and couldn’t have been treated any better. Luckily I was waiting for two years like some of my friends and sister to get a hip or knee replacement in extreme pain like they are.
Oh, you should take your head out of the sand “Fed Up” Dr. shortages are not unique to Lethbridge and/or Alberta for that matter… just take a look to your “politically correct” Province to the West… In fact every Province and Territory! I do like the strategy of our upcoming Prime Minister, and his proactive approach to getting the fully qualified and readily available recent immigrant doctors “Canadian certified” and in the field, not hindered by “Federal Gatekeepers” who currently make the certification process tedious and exhaustive!
So how do you explain why the retired doctors, nurses, and teachers, including those in my family all point out that under Lougheed and Getty they were never treated the way they have seen them treated by these Reformers. They never had their contracts destroyed or were accused of being over paid. It’s a well know fact that Alberta has never fully recovered from what Ralph Klein did to us and of course just like Jason Kenney Klein was a Liberal turn Reformer.
I have still never forgotten the stupid comments we heard from the Klein supporters after they woke up and realized the healthcare mess he had created for them. One guy stated he needed cancer surgery and couldn’t get it because of what Klein had done. His comment was “ I supported Ralph Klein and look what the bastard did to me”. There were a whole lot of people in Edmonton who died waiting for cancer surgeries and the suffering we have seen with seniors needing hip and knee surgeries has increased under these reformers, while they have promised to fix it. You can’t fix it without increasing your doctors and nurses and that’s not happening.
I certainly agree with you on what Trudeau is trying to do and certainly have no intention of bashing him for what he did for this province during the pandemic and latest oil industry crash and the oil executives certainly agree.
Oh, Fedup Conservative, you fashion the phrase, ” Best to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt! “
Fedup Conservative’s comment re: the Klein era health care cutbacks brings back memories. I was a frontline healthcare professional working in Lethbridge at the time and the cutbacks then were, brutal. The most glaring issue was the loss of about 200 acute care beds with the loss of the acute care St. Michael’s General Hospital. Before then, folks did not wait long to see a specialist and did not wait long for needed surgery. It was well worth while for doctors then, to come, and stay, in Lethbridge. Now, we, with an ever expanding population growth in the city and surrounding area, we are expected to cope with half of the acute care beds? For Alberta alone, (with regard to health care staff and doctor shortages across the country), we never did recover from the Klein era health care cutbacks. We lost many excellent health care professionals including doctors to the USA and elsewhere at the time, and, they all, also welcomed with open arms, our well trained registered nurses. Had we been able to retain our 400 acute care beds, the now shortages of doctors and other health care professionals could have been much less painful.
And agreed, myself, now a recent retiree, we did do/still do, our best on the front lines. It’s the way of the Hippocratic Oath.
I will never forget the nurses bawling their eyes out in my office when Klein destroyed their careers. Some where single mothers with teenage kids and they could no longer pay their mortgage payments and being a Royal Bank Manager I was unstable to help them. Most of the ones I helped leave went to the U.S. and even ones who didn’t go were being hounded by American Hospitals to come and join them. They saw it as a big win for them to get Canadian trained doctors and nurses without having to do anything to deserve it. Ralph Klein was their hero.
His father Phil said to me “Al what in the hell is the matter with that son of mine. While he gives away billions in oil royalties he is making us try to live without a proper health care system and this could cost some Albertans their lives. Phil was right that’s what it did and the lawsuits launched against Klein proved it, one was almost my father.
You can bet these UCP supporters don’t give a damn about what they have done until they are the ones at the end of the line like many we saw were and most didn’t survive what Klein did to them. As they say “ You Can’t Fix Stupid “. Those of us in Edmonton think Rural Alberta is going to be in a horrible mess, if these doctors who are threatening to leave do. It will definitely cost some people their lives.
The impacts of the Klein cuts were certainly brutal. They were also ham fisted and unimaginative. As a case in point, the three main universities saw their provincial grant cut by the same percentage (20%) and over the same three-year period. No consideration was given to economies of scale. The UofA and UofC were and are still both much larger institutions, and were able to absorb those cuts with less relative pain than the UofL.
Add that to what one of Lougheed’s former MLAs said to me about deregulation of electricity. He said “ Deregulation of electricity was the dirtiest trick Klein could have played on the Alberta people. This will cost us billions of dollars and put some businesses out of business destroying jobs. Just think what this will do to the cost of our healthcare and education systems?” The last figures I heard were that it had cost Albertans an extra $40 billion and that was about 10 years ago.
Regarding electricity deregulation under Klein’s watch, I learned from a very reliable person that Klein admitted, on at least one occasion of which my source was aware, that he didn’t really understand the implications of the policy change, but he rammed it through anyway.
I certainly believe that. I had known Ralph since I was 19 years old and knew what a jerk he was. When he was trying to become premier his mother Flo told my mother that she didn’t think he was capable of running this province properly. Mom told her that no one in her family had any intention of supporting him and we didn’t. Mom said Flo wasn’t surprised. His biggest mistake according to the former MLAs I got to know was that he refused to listen to anyone, including Peter Lougheed . Don Getty told me in 2003 that inviting Liberal Ralph Klein into the Conservative Party was the dumbest thing he had ever done, and I certainly agreed. The damage he did to this province is unbelievable. He thought he was a lot smarter than anyone else. Even members of his own family tried to help us vote him out. They knew what a disaster he was.
This is what happens when you elect a grade 10 high school dropout with a major drinking problem who thinks he is a lot smarter than anyone else, and refuses to take advise from anyone including our hero Peter Lougheed. It’s no different that what these reformers are doing to us now.