Don't get a stroke in a Liberal-run, universal-health system hospital

A National Post story by Sharon Kirkey (Feb.21, 2008) carried this headline: “Hospitals in Ontario aren't good places to have a stroke”:

“One of the worst places to be if you have a stroke is in a hospital, new research suggests.

A study based on thousands of Ontario residents found patients who have a stroke while they're already in hospital wait twice as long for a brain scan and twice as long for a clot-busting drug as people who come to an emergency room with a stroke. They are also more likely to die.

"You would think, naively, that if someone has a stroke while in hospital -- given that we keep emphasizing that the sooner you get to treatment the better -- you would anticipate that they would have the best treatment," says Dr. Frank Silver, co-principal investigator of the Registry of the Canadian Stroke Network and professor of medicine at the University of Toronto.

"They're in hospital, there's no delay in getting to hospital." In other words, the so-called "stroke to arrival time" is virtually zero.

That means more of them should be eligible for drugs that break up clots and reduce the risk of brain damage -- drugs that can't be used past a deadline of three hours from the onset of stroke.

But instead of doing better than people who have a stroke at home or work, the hospital patients did worse.

Unlike the emergency response, when a patient goes into sudden cardiac arrest, most hospital wards have no system of calling for help when a patient has a stroke, Silver says.

The study "really tells hospitals that they need to get their act together in terms of being able to educate their staff so that they recognize when a stroke is occurring in a patient, and that they have a system in place to deal with it on an emergency basis," Silver says.

Warning signs of stroke include sudden numbness, weakness or loss of feeling down one side of the body, slurred speech or trouble speaking, sudden dizziness, double vision and a sudden, severe headache.”

*
So: in Ontario's supposedly-Utopian, universal, government-run, single-payer health monopoly, the hospitals still “need to get their act together in terms of being able to educate their staff so that they recognize when a stroke is occurring in a patient, and that they have a system in place to deal with it on an emergency basis" ??!!

With all the billions of tax-dollars that the Liberals are dumping into health care, the universal health care system still hasn't figured this out?

Ontarians are better off getting a stroke when they’re NOT already in the hospital ???

Unbelievable.

Is this the kind of government-run health care Michael Moore fantasizes about?? Is this what U.S. Democrats desire?? Don't they know that Canadian patients are being forced to the States for treatment because medicare can’t provide for them here?

Let’s remember, this is happening in Liberal-run Ontario, where MPP’s like Jim Bradley pretend there is nothing wrong with his Liberal sicko health care monopoloy.