Yukoners go to emergency room for basic care, after territory's last walk-in clinic closes
CBC
For 23 years, Marianne Blythe didn't worry about getting medical care when she needed it.
She was a regular patient of the River Valley Medical walk-in clinic in Whitehorse and never had trouble getting an appointment.
But when the doctor she was seeing recently left town, the clinic stopped taking walk-in patients. It was the only remaining walk-in medical clinic in the territory.
"I feel very betrayed. I feel betrayed by a system that I have supported all my life," Blythe, 71, said.
"And as I age, I expect that the things that I have supported will be there to help me."
Blythe wants to see more action from the territorial government — including a new walk-in clinic sooner than later — and more incentives for students in the territory to become doctors.
Blythe is now one of the 2,472 Yukoners on the territorial government's wait-list to get a family doctor.
And waiting for a family doctor has meant even more waiting for Blythe.
She said she has spent about five hours in the emergency room on two recent occasions, just to get a doctor's signature for regular blood work needed for her chronic condition.
"I get very angry because I don't know the logistics of running an emergency ward, but I know that my being there costs an awful lot of money and there are people who are really sick, who need that," she said.
The lack of a walk-in clinic comes as Yukon's hospital system is under strain. The territory is in the middle of a COVID-19 outbreak that has left it with the highest rate of active cases in the country.
And according to a Yukon Hospital Corporation spokesperson, the number of non-emergency visits to the Whitehorse General Hospital's emergency department — such as for prescription refills and common colds — is going up.
These types of visits made up 4.4 per cent of all patients from April to June, and that number went up to seven per cent from July to September, Matthew Davidson wrote in an email to CBC News.
Greg Penner, 59, is another one of the thousands of Yukoners on the territorial government's family doctor wait-list.