LETTER: Aldergrove woman underwhelmed with new hospital ER

Dear Editor,

Re: [New ER opens to public, Aldergrove Star, May 14]

After reading about all the people singing the praises of the new ER in Langley in the Friday, May 14 issue of the Aldergrove Star, I found my visit on the same day – to support a friend who had to attend the ER, resulted in a six-hour wait in the parking lot.

After a lot of thought, it occurred to me that they may want to adopt the same practice as the hospitals in the Interior, of installing TVs and having an abundance of reading material, so that patients won’t notice such oversights as a urine sample that four hours after being collected, was still in the ER and nowhere near the lab.

Or the fact that the doctor who said he’d issue a script for said results from the lab had since gone home and a new doctor was waiting for the results from a sample that apparently got lost on the way to the lab.

It was noted that there seemed to be an obvious understaffing and hence a lack of attention to detail (perhaps on certain shifts).

Our attendance both in the ER and the parking lot lasted from 1 p.m. until 7 p.m., neither one of us had eaten since the early morning on that day, while trying to find a clinic to help my friend address their problem. The ER was the last resort.

Neither one of us had lunch or a snack, much less any water.

The script finally came without said results from the elusive sample sent to the lab, which bad both of us scratching our heads, as to why we spent six hours in that facility.

Hunger was accompanied by sheer exhaustion having spent a day in absolute stir craziness.

The over-population of visits to ER is compounded by the existence of the pandemic we are all dealing with. This problem exists because there are no medical walk-in clinics that accept any walk-in patients, and as a result, people are forced to go to the ER.

Is going to the ER any safer, for everyone concerned, than going to a walk-in clinic these days? That is the question.

Spending six hours in the ER environment that is laden with illness and potentially spreading the pandemic seems counter-productive to me.

Have all the cosmetic renovations helped with patient care, and were the staff consulted as to what improvements could have helped them in their ultimate goal of caring more effectively for their patients in a more “timely” fashion?

Helen Solski, Aldergrove

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