The doctors noticed it, and now it's confirmed.
The number of visits people have been making to the emergency department at the Humboldt District Hospital (HDH) has definitely gone up in the past year.
The hospital's fiscal year runs from April 1 to the end of March, explained Eric Sarauer, the interim site manager for the HDH.
In the 2009 fiscal year, there were about 9,000 emergency room visits. It was the same for the 2010 fiscal year, ending March 31, 2011.
However, between April 1, 2011 and December 31, 2011, people had already made 8,492 visits to the HDH emergency room, with three months left to go in the fiscal year.
"It's a significant increase, for sure," Sarauer said.
Going back beyond 2009, 2008's numbers were around 8,500 emergency room (ER) visits in 12 months, so the numbers were more or less consistent.
"It's changed very little until this year," Sarauer noted.
It's clear that more people are visiting the emergency room. What's a little more murky is the reason for it.
Sarauer was unable to point to one root cause of the rise, or even several concrete reasons. With only the numbers to use, it's very difficult to determine why this has been happening.
"The population increase over this time has got to be part of it," Sarauer said, noting that while the number of actual residents in the area has increased, so has likely the transient population.
Sarauer also suspects it has something to do with the increase in activity in the area, including construction projects in Humboldt, and the work that has been going on at the site of the proposed BHP Billiton mine near Jansen and LeRoy.
"Business in general is booming," Sarauer said.
Sarauer also suggested that Humboldt has been the recipient of more patients in their emergency room because of issues at other rural facilities in this part of the province.
Emergency rooms in Wynyard and Wadena, for instance, have been on bypass, opening only on alternate weeks, due to a lack of physicians.
"People are coming here for service instead of Saskatoon or other alternatives," he said. "That could be a part of it. It's really hard to pin-point (the exact cause)."
Management at the HDH has been tracking this increase in activity through monthly reports.
"It's a bit of a surprise it's (come) up as much as it has," Sarauer said.
These numbers will be "important information come budget time, which is coming up," Sarauer noted, and will help them plan for future needs.
The major impact of this increase in visits has been felt by the doctors, Sarauer indicated.
"We know that when the ER is busy, the doctor on call would spend more time there, instead of going back to the clinic and seeing more of their own patients," he said.
The number of doctors practising in Humboldt has dropped back to seven, after rising to eight late last year, with one doctor going on an indefinite leave.
Seven is too few to handle the large patient load in this area, and the shortage has resulted in long waiting lists for appointments at the Humboldt Clinic, though doctors are working long hours at the clinic, in addition to covering 24-hour on-call shifts at the HDH emergency room.
The emergency room at the HDH is open 24 hours per day, and is staffed with nurses. Doctors are on-call.
The doctors themselves, the Saskatoon Health Region, and a doctor recruitment and retention team in Humboldt has been working on getting more physicians into the community to relieve the pressure on these seven physicians, and they are hoping to have more doctors start working in Humboldt this year.
