Dear Editor
My mother-in-law was admitted to Battlefords Union Hospital in distress with a Crohn's attack. As might be the case many other nights, her own doctor, who has had her as a patient for over 40 years, was not the doctor on call. Lo and behold, the health district has made a policy where she now automatically becomes the patient of the doctor on call, and the hospital does not even contact her family doctor. Her own doctor is not allowed to see her anymore, as she is no longer his patient.
I would like to know where and how this could make any sense whatsoever. The surgeon who's patient she now is, and whom I might add did not even stick his head in her room, was all set to operate on her. She will be 92 years old in a few weeks, has had Crohn's for the last 40 years, has had the same doctor for all those years and who knows her as a patient and a person, and they do not even let him know she has been admitted.
Her "new" doctor plans to subject her to an operation ,which likely as not would kill her, and does not even consult her own doctor.
As luck would have it, she has daughters who live here, and can, through them, hopefully have her returned to her own doctor's care. But if she had no one to intercede for her, or was too sick to be her own advocate, then 40 years of doctor-patient relationship is out the window. And another person is lost due to unnecessary or unadvisable surgery.
If this is one of the new "streamlined" policies that some bone headed, heartless bureaucrats have put in place in our heath district, then they had better take a long hard look at this ridiculous and dangerous practice, and change it before another patient becomes a statistic.
Lyle E. Comstock
Battleford
