Public health agency warns of pending flu season peak across the province
Santé Québec, the agency that now oversees public health services all over the province, is advising patients and caregivers that with influenza rates up and the winter flu season almost peaking, turning up at a hospital’s emergency department isn’t necessarily the best course of action to take when there are other alternatives.
Challenging situation
According to Santé Québec, close to half the visits made by patients to emergency departments between February 4 and 10 were by people whose needs were not in fact of an emergency nature.
“It is a challenge,” Robin Marie Coleman, Santé Québec’s assistant vice-president for access to health services, conceded regarding the misconceptions during a video conference call with journalists last Friday.
Long wait times
“This is definitely something we’re trying to work on,” she added, while agreeing with a journalist that wait times for some of the agency’s services, such as the 8-1-1 medical triage phone central for non-urgent health issues, can be long, although less so in comparison to hospital emergency department wait times.
“Sometimes the wait times are long,” she said. “But to put it in perspective, with the long wait times sometimes in the emergency rooms, it’s better and healthier for people to stay at home if they have non-urgent care, and wait in order to be re-directed to a clinic directly with an appointment, rather than expose themselves in an emergency room when it’s not an emergency situation.”
Healthier for people to stay at home if they have non-urgent medical issues, says Santé Québec
Sometimes the best option
According to Coleman, 70 per cent of those patients who turned up at emergency departments in early February had family doctors, while others may have had other options available to them. In cases like these, she continued, “the best option is to stay safely at home if it’s a non-emergency situation and be directly directed to the right service.”
But at the same time, she acknowledged that the province’s hospital emergency departments remain inadequate to handle the burden with which they are currently tasked. “We need to improve the different services, and first-line services, and make things much easier for people,” she said.
Worst season in a decade
Late last week, the level of flu activity in Quebec was elevated, said Dr. Luc Boileau, director of public health for the province. He said Santé Québec was following the situation closely, since the province could in fact be facing one of its worst flu seasons in the last 10 years.
He said that in other Canadian provinces, like Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, the presence of influenza had been notably higher this year. “We expect the peak soon to be reached, or that it soon will be,” he continued.
According to Dr. Boileau, it’s never too late to be vaccinated against influenza, and that it is recommended especially for persons regarded as vulnerable, which includes those with compromised immunity and the elderly.