The Kootenay Health Authority is laying off nurses and shutting down operating rooms. Doctors at the hospital in Trail voted non-confidence in the KHA because the move reverses diligent efforts of the past two years to build surgical capabilities and recruit trained staff.
Health Minister Kevin Falcon says this does not represent a cut in health care, that some categories of surgery at that hospital actually happen “ahead of the provincial average.” He said that wait time for knee surgeries has been lower in Trail than elsewhere in the province. The Minister did not respond to the claim that over 1,000 Kootenay patients face surgical wait times of more than a year.
Kevin Falcon believes that Kootenay residents should be punished and general surgery wait times increased because knee surgeries have happened there too quickly.
We can deduce that a solution is to divert patients from one wait stream to another. If patients expecting heart or cancer surgery would agree to knee operations, the delays in joint replacement would lengthen. Thus, the rationale for trimming other surgical resources becomes invalid.
Any volunteers?
Categories: Health
in-sights.ca 
So Kootcoot, how are your knees?
Seriously, knee operations represent fewer than 1% of surgical patients so it is particularly dishonest for Falcon to use that procedure as the measurement.
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“Kevin Falcon believes that Kootenay residents should be punished and general surgery wait times increased because knee surgeries have happened there too quickly.“
It might have to do with the fact that we also refuse to send members of the BC liaR party to Victoria.
Then again, in 2001, we sent Gordo's stooge, Blair Suffredine, to be part of the bullying 77 member gang. During the scorched earth campaign of Gordo's first term of attacking health care, education and social services, the Interior Health Authority and its subsidiary the Kootenay Region sufferred the biggest cuts in the entire province with some hospitals being completely closed (Kimberley, Castelgar) and others downgraded to virtual first aid stations. Not unrelatedly, the executives of the IHA enjoyed the largest “performance” bonuses in the province's health care system.
That and attacks on the inland ferry system, forestry and other local services delivered from Victoria at our expense, led to Blair being able to return to his legal practice after one term.
I now have to travel, in all weather on mountain roads 1 1/2 to 2 hours to Trail for most medical needs more sophisticated than advice to go home, get some rest and take an aspirin – and it takes very little in the way of complications to require a trip of most of a day (unless by air – ha, ha) to the hellhole known as Kelowna General to join the throngs on carts in the hallway in the land of permanent Code Purple!
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