St. Joseph’s General Hospital Elliot Lake (SJGHEL) CEO Jeremy Stevenson has issued a plea for patience to the public regarding the use of local physician services and the hospital emergency department. He says SJGHEL is struggling with the same challenges seen in media stories about public healthcare recently, across Ontario.
This is because emergency departments across the province have been suffering closures, mainly caused by shortages of healthcare staff and physicians.
The following is the text of Mr. Stevenson’s statement.
Here at St. Joseph's General Hospital Elliot Lake, (SJGHEL) emergency department closures have been narrowly averted on numerous occasions.
If your physician needs to cancel your scheduled appointment at their community office; please consider that in some cases, these physicians have cancelled their office clinics in order to provide coverage at SJGHEL and keep our emergency department open for the most urgent needs.
Without their willingness to provide this support, there have been many occasions on which our emergency department would have had to close to emergency care. Your understanding makes a difference.
While emergency department closure is something we have yet to experience, we are not immune to the situations other rural hospitals have experienced and continue to prepare for the possibility. There are things you can do to help as well. While we realize it is not always possible with the province-wide shortage of family physicians:
- Please try to use the emergency department for the services it is designed for – true emergencies such as chest pains, respiratory distress, broken bones, lacerations, accidents, new neurological symptoms, uncontrolled bleeding, loss of consciousness, physical trauma, etc.
- Please try to ensure that your prescriptions are up to date and filled before they are past due.
- If you require non-urgent care please consider options such as:
- If possible, seek medical care from your family physician through the Family Health Team
- If you are someone who does not have access to a family physician, consider making use of the many online services available to access a spectrum of medical care, including prescription renewals, requisitions and referrals when needed, such as cloudmd.ca
- For general health advice, call the new Health Connect Ontario service at 811 or chat online with a registered nurse at Health Connect Ontario
- In emergency situations, call 911 as ambulances will always transport patients to the best location for care. We are working hard for you every day in an effort to keep our ED open despite the challenges, and we appreciate the ongoing support of our community to stand behind our hospital and our team.
While we continue to work to the limits of our capacity to fight the need to close our ED, in the event that we do experience closures that we have seen in other rural hospitals, we will make every effort with our community partners and regional hospitals to ensure our community can access necessary treatment as required.
Jeremy Stevenson, CEO, SJGHEL