Last week my family had a few stressful moments. My mother had heart-related complications, and at the end of this ordeal the final diagnosis was that she had had a very minor stroke. Mom's 91 years old and while she is doing well mentally, her physical health has deteriorated. We are cautiously optimistic that Mom will do just fine now but as our family was going through the "system" I couldn't stop thinking about some observations for this blog.

Our entire experience encompassed a total of 48 hours sitting in the emergency ward, 20 hours in a hospital bed and two separate visits, one of which included an ambulance. Mom's stressful and overwhelming journey started at 1:30 am on a Thursday morning and came to an end when she returned home from her second trip to the hospital on Monday afternoon at 4:00 pm. The emergency room left much to be desired. The halls were filled with beds of patients awaiting diagnosis and treatment. All of the seats in the waiting area were filled to capacity... you could cut the tension of everyone's stress with a knife. Health care workers were continuously moving, working selflessly to provide service in a system that is stressed-out and in need of care itself.

Most of the time, being armed with information is a good thing. This particular time, I sometimes wish I didn't know that 40% of emergency room visits are from preventable injuries... it makes me angry. Because I've experienced this chaos first-hand with my Mom, I am particularly upset and terribly frustrated knowing that a solution is at hand. Placing injury and disease prevention as a provincial priority will fix this huge health care problem. This is not complicated. When will pockets of influence in our great province start listening to what we have to offer as injury prevention advocates and accept our help in moving forward to a new paradigm in health care service?

For the time being please, no more studies, no more research, no more projects that will detract and waste valuable time from allowing us to arrive at this pragmatic solution. Every day we avoid getting to this solution, look the other way and do not have the courage to face it head on, 435 people are injured in Saskatchewan, 10 are permanently disabled and one person dies from a preventable injury - - - not to mention that an additional burden of $2.7 million is placed on Saskatchewan's economy, families in Saskatchewan are subjected to the stress resulting from an ineffective "system" and our province's health care providers continue to be overwhelmed.