Editor:
The following letter was addressed to Vancouver Coastal Health Patient Care Quality Office and shared with Coast Reporter.
In December I attended Sechelt Hospital (SH) due to the possibility of having experienced a potentially serious medical event and my care was, as always, superb. I was referred to a neurologist at Lion’s Gate Hospital who also consulted by phone during my visit as we don’t have one here on the Coast. He ultimately referred me to SH imaging for –– among other tests –– an echo cardiogram and sent a requisition to SH. I heard nothing from SH but didn’t want to “bug them” either so I didn’t follow up until recently... and was told on the phone that SH doesn’t currently have a technician and they can’t offer appointments for about a year except for emergencies.
Now, that’s unfortunate and I understand there’s little the hospital can do about that but I think it’s egregious that they did not even bother to inform the referring physician and essentially just ignored the requisition! How many people are waiting for an appointment that won’t happen?
Sechelt Hospital needs to do better on this and, indeed, VCH needs to have a system-side notification procedure and policy for situations like this; people’s lives may depend on it and it’s trivial to fix.
Arne Hermann,
Elphinstone
