Our health care system is in a fairly dire state right now.
Patient waits are too long at ERs, there are not enough doctors, nurses, nor nurse practitioners in hospitals, there are not enough family doctors, and on top of that, we have a population that is both growing and aging. We need more of everything, and we needed it five years ago – if not sooner.
The problem with problems like this is that it takes time to solve them.
Some reforms can be done quickly, but most require years of work.
The B.C. government increased spaces in medical schools and nursing programs for example.
But it takes the better part of a decade to make a new doctor. It takes four years to graduate a new nurse.
It’s possible that we have already at least partly addressed the problem of a lack of sufficient health care workers graduating in B.C., but the reforms will take years to take effect. And while we can make some educated guesses about whether we’re (finally) training enough doctors and nurses (and paramedics and medical technicians and so on) we won’t know if it’s really enough to keep up for years. How bad will rates of burnout be in 10 years? How many healthcare workers will leave to work elsewhere after graduating?
This is just one of a number of thorny problems we’re dealing with right now.
This year in B.C. is an election year, so it’s a good time to think about how governments respond to these kind of long-term structural problems. We have major issues not just with health care, but with housing, a toxic drug crisis, overcrowded schools, homelessness, and more.
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Many of these problems are so big now because they weren’t nipped in the bud years ago.
If the governments of 20 to 25 years ago had vigorously tackled homelessness and the high cost of housing with legislation and new construction, if we’d instituted a crash program to build schools in fast-growing communities, if we’d invested more in drug treatment and harm reduction programs, we wouldn’t be using the word “crisis” for any of these issues.
But governments – and people in general – are often bad at dealing with little problems that are slowly getting bigger.
There’s always some more pressing problem that needs to be dealt with right now, darn it!
From this point forward, we have about 10 months to ask the leaders of our various parties not just what they’re going to do about the big problems, but what they plan to do about the little problems.
Fixing those molehills before they become mountains is the best investment we can make.