Dr. Brian Goldman

But I wanted people to understand how we think and how we're trying to figure out how you tick, given the fact that people don't always want to tell you exactly what they're thinking.

And it may be because they're concealing criminal activity or they may just be ashamed.

They may just not want to bear it themselves, admit it to themselves that this is something that they're doing.

Some of the solutions are new and some are old.

Let's just kick the old ones off to the side, just cover them and move them to the side.

Hospitals or the provinces have taken hospital beds out of the system, either through attrition or

or by not growing the number of hospital beds commensurate with the population.

So right now, roughly speaking, more or less in per capita bed allocations for the provinces, we're down about anywhere from about two thirds to about three quarters of the number of beds we had 30 years ago.

Now, yeah, so it sounds bad.

In some cases, we've been able to make up for the shortfall in other ways.

So for instance, 30, 40 years ago, we didn't have same-day surgery for appendicitis, for appendectomies and for taking gallbladders out.

And now we have a lot of same-day surgery that we didn't have way back when.

And so when you have same-day surgery, then you have people arriving

You know, they haven't had anything to eat overnight because they have to have an empty belly, they get put under anesthesia, they get their surgery, they get extubated, they spend a couple of hours or maybe six hours in the recovery room and then they go home.

Well, they didn't do that 30 years ago, so maybe you need fewer beds for that.

But we took more beds out of the system, assuming, for instance, that there would be better home care, which there isn't, that there would be better community supports, community clinics, mental health clinics, substance use clinics.

And there haven't been.

They haven't kept pace with the need.

So one obvious solution is to boost the number of beds.

Second thing is that we don't have enough long-term care beds for an aging population.