Better doctor access will help keep post-op patients outside the ER: Doctors of BC

CHILLIWACK (NEWS 1130) – Hospital patients need better access to their doctors after surgery to keep them out of Emergency Rooms, that’s according to the group representing physicians in the province.

This follows a study from one hospital that showed 15 per cent of patients had to go back after having surgery.

The study from the BC Medical Journal found patients at Chilliwack General Hospital end up going to the Emergency Room due to bleeding, pain, and infections associated with their surgery.

Dr. Eric Cadesky with Doctors of BC says there needs to be more communication in the health care system to prevent patients from going back to the hospital when it’s not necessary.

“The reasons for going back are common but preventable,” he says. “So the issue is that many of these, the reasons people are going to the emergency room, can be dealt with by phone, secure messaging, or video conferencing.”

Numbers from 2016 show that nearly 10 per cent of people in B.C. go back to the hospital following an operation.

“Continuity of care is something that our healthcare system should be striving to achieve and we have to think about all the different ways that we have available to us to get that access and ways to support doctors to provide that accessibility,” Cadesky adds. “We know that the quality of care improves when there’s continuity and when there isn’t continuity of care that increases the rate of complications and re-admission.”

Seventy-two-year-old David Aubin went in for colon cancer surgery and heart fibrillations but says 10 days out, he’s still bleeding and isn’t sure what’s going on.

“The system is so convoluted and of all these doctors, I only saw them once over a two-week period,” Aubin says. “It’s a faceless medical system.”

He says it’s difficult for people like him who don’t have a family doctor to have any sort of follow-up.

Cadesky says the quickest fix is to make sure patients can consult with a family physician or their surgeon, noting many patients aren’t sure what to expect when they’re sent home to recover.

“Given 15 per cent of people don’t have a family doctor, given that there is so much demand on doctors’ time, we have to make it easy and accessible for people to communicate with their doctors,” he says.

In the Vancouver Coastal Health region, the re-admission rate is around 8.5 per cent and that’s not specific to surgical patients.

-With files from Marcella Bernardo