Surgery wait time is far too long
By Lethbridge Herald on March 6, 2025.
Editor,
My husband has been waiting more than two years for hip surgery. He is now using a walker and is not able to do anything he used to be able to do. We were told his surgery would be between October and December 2024. In December we were told it would be in January or February of 2025. When we called today we were told that the wife of the surgeon is having a baby and the surgery is now postponed to September.
Is this what we can expect from our health care system? It is discouraging and depressing. If he doesn’t want to do the surgery he should let us know so that we don’t get our hopes up.
Joyce Wilde
Welling
6-5
Have his doctor refer him to Medicine Hat. Dr. Riaz (and others) do a fantastic job and the wait time is mere months, not years.
I, and my family, concur….much less waiting time. The drive to Medicine Hat has been worth it for us.
Friends and relatives have waited the same. That’s what you get from letting Reformers treat our doctors and nurse like third class citizens, while they tear up their contracts and accuse them of being over paid .
Yet they allow highly paid Private for Profit Clinics to be open and screw the taxpayers out of a lot more money. This is all about forcing Albertans into an American Style healthcare system and you would be damn fools not to see it, wouldn’t you? It wasn’t this way under Lougheed and Getty, was it?
I don’t know about you, but I have relatives who were and are medical professionals, including nurses, and they had to deal with Ralph Klein’s senseless cuts to the public healthcare system in Alberta. The UCP are just like he was. They want private for profit healthcare in Alberta.
Yes my family members and friends who were involved in the medical industry under Lougheed and Getty say they were never treated the way they have seen them treated under Klein and the UCP. Under Klein two family members and seven friends lost their jobs. I helped 9 doctors and at least two dozen nurses relocate out of this province when Klein was closing their hospitals, closing hospital beds and cutting their jobs.
Again, before the brutal Conservative Klein era health care cutbacks in the late 80s/early 90s, Lethbridge had 400 acute care beds. In those days, folks did not wait long for referrals to specialists and could get their surgeries done in a timely manner. And, there were excellent smaller hospitals in smaller surrounding communities where folks could go back home to their own communities for recovery and rehabilitation. Also, doctors were attracted to Lethbridge because of adequate acute care beds and stayed here. Now, we’re expected to cope with half the acute care beds and an ever increasing population in Lethbridge and surrounding areas. Folks need to understand that, how they vote and cutbacks like these, are intertwined.
Certainly, myself, and many others, as now retired front line health care professionals in Lethbridge, and a member of United Nurses of Alberta who participated in the illegal, but necessary strike in 1988, were well aware of what the Conservative government of the day thought of us and how we were treated, by them. I remember my local Conservative MLA screaming at me on the phone to get back to work. I used to vote for the progressive conservatism of yore in Alberta, but now, I will not vote for the now, authoritarian, toxic ultra right wing politics here who continue to underfund health care on purpose to continue the drive toward private-for-profit health care, and all of their other failed policies including underfunding education. What a mess……