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A general surgeon in Gatineau, Que., says staff shortages in the region’s hospitals have reached a critical level.
“It’s October, I’ve been here for 10 months and I have over 120 patients on my waiting list,” Dr. Maxime Guieu said in a French-language interview with Radio-Canada this week.
Originally from France, Guieu is set to take charge of the general surgery department at Santé Québec Outaouais.
According to Guieu, local operating rooms are currently available only two days a month. He said last January there were five to six days of availability per month, split between the hospitals in Gatineau and Buckingham.
“We manage to pull some strings to secure operating rooms in Hull or other places. That’s how we manage to perform surgeries for oncology cases, four days a month,” he said.
Not being able to tell a patient when their surgery will take place is tough, Guieu said.
“If it’s cancer, I can tell them roughly that it will be within three months, which is absolutely unacceptable,” he said, adding that the wait time for oncology patients should be no more than one month.
Patients who wait too long for surgery often end up requiring emergency hospitalization because their condition has worsened, he said.
Retirements at play
Marc Bilodeau, the president and CEO of Santé Québec Outaouais (SQO), said depending on the availability of operating room staff, the province has contingency plans in place to ensure essential services are maintained should it face further staff losses.
Bilodeau acknowledges that there is significant pressure on medical teams and notes that the system is facing a shortage of nursing staff and anesthesia specialists, partly due to retirements.
Marc Bilodeau is the president and CEO of Santé Québec Outaouais. (Radio-Canada)
The most critical shortages are in the operating room in Gatineau, where more than half of the nursing positions remain unfilled — a deficit of 22 nurses, according to Santé Québec Outaouais.
Karine D’Auteuil, president of the union representing health-care professionals in the Outaouais region, said it’s not fair for staff to endure the weight of all this.
Guieu opposes the idea of sending patients elsewhere to undergo their surgeries.
“This is hardly acceptable to us, given that we have the technical capacity — the doctors and the surgeons.”
Bilodeau said there are financial mechanisms in place to bring in specialists from outside the region.