Longer than normal wait times at CKHA
It ensures that critically ill patients will remain the priority for service.
If you are not experiencing an emergency, you are asked to look for care in community settings, like your family physician or walk-in clinic to reduce strain at the emergency department.
In Chatham-Kent, walk-in clinics and other resources are available here.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBC
an hour ago
- CBC
Being my mom's medical proxy was heartbreaking, but I'd do it all over again
This First Person article is the experience of Lynn Paulin, who was born and raised in P.E.I. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ. On Aug. 22, 2024, I received a text message from my mom. She had decided to go to the emergency room. The back pain she had been dealing with for the past month had become unbearable. I offered to make the 40-minute drive to the hospital to sit with her. She told me not to make the trip over what she suspected was nothing more than a pulled muscle. Not wanting to impose, I respected her wishes and stayed home. I wish I hadn't. Mom walked into the hospital that night thinking it was a minor injury and walked out the next morning with a diagnosis of Stage 4 metastatic lung cancer that had spread to her spine and crushed one of her vertebrae. For an entire month, she had been walking around with a broken back. We barely had time for this news to sink in before phones started ringing from doctors' offices and hospitals informing us of next steps. Attending medical appointments with Mom was not a new occurrence. I had been accompanying her regularly since she was diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) 18 months earlier. IPF is defined by the Canadian Lung Association as a chronic lung disease that causes irreversible scarring or "fibrosis" of the lung tissue. As the scarring worsens, the lungs stiffen up and breathing becomes more difficult. Prior to her diagnosis, I had never heard of IPF. I spent a lot of time researching the disease, hoping to gain a better understanding of what we were up against. Of all the things I learned, the most intriguing one came directly from Mom herself. Thirty-one years prior, in December 1993, her mom passed from the same disease. The average life expectancy for someone with IPF is three to five years from diagnosis in the absence of a lung transplant. We knew where things were heading for my mom. The cancer just expedited the inevitable. Early September saw us spending more time inside the hospital. The frequency of appointments increased while Mom's stamina and vitality waned. Multiple times a week, I found myself standing with my arms crossed, peppering doctors with questions, mimicking a level of concern I learned from years of watching her do the same for her own children. My brother and I were Mom's whole world. This was reflected in the anxious body language she tried her best to hide whenever something ailed us. She always kept her arms crossed while talking to doctors. It wasn't until I was older that I realized why she did it. She was hiding her shaking hands. Even in her most vulnerable moments, she was being strong for us. Most of us expect to care for our parents at some point. I just didn't expect to do it in my 30s. Not for Mom anyway. My dad has long suffered from a myriad of pre-existing and self-inflicted health conditions. There was always an unspoken awareness that something bad could happen sooner rather than later. It never crossed my mind to think Mom would be sooner. By Sept. 22, 2024, almost two weeks had passed since mom had eaten or drunk more than a couple of sips of a protein shake. She could no longer walk and was asleep more than she was awake. I told her it was time to go to the hospital. She was too weak to protest. I assisted her to the car and, for the first time, really felt the weight of how frail she had become. While waiting to be admitted, Mom said something that instantly made me break into a cold sweat. "There are birds flying around the room. Can you see them?" she asked. I dug through the giant folder of pamphlets and info sheets given to us by her doctor until I found what I was looking for: a medical directive. A medical directive allows the patient to assign someone else to make decisions regarding their care. While we waited for the doctor, we spoke about her wishes. We agreed that Dad's love for her, combined with his predisposition for rash decision-making, may not be the best fit in this situation. We didn't want to add any additional strain on my younger brother, whose first child was due in early December. So, the honour naturally fell to me. I signed the form, knowing it would eventually be relevant, but thinking I had time to prepare. I didn't. On Sept. 25, I received a call from the hospital informing me that my mom was declining and I needed to get there as soon as possible. The same 40-minute drive I opted not to make barely a month prior became the most critical trip of my life. On the way to the hospital, I stopped to pick up my mom's niece for extra support. My brother, his heavily pregnant partner, and my dad arrived soon after. Mom was in a small isolation room transitioning between moments of deep sleep and partial lucidity. She knew who we were and why we were there, but not much else. WATCH | Over 1 million young Canadian caregivers need help, experts say: Over 1 million young Canadian caregivers need help, experts say 18 days ago Duration 2:04 Canada has more than one million young caregivers between the ages of 15 and 30 who are looking after loved ones with long-term health problems, and health-care workers say that without more support, they risk harm to their well-being. I learned that due to Mom's delirium, all decisions about her care would be deferred to me. The doctor asked what kind of life-saving measures should be taken into consideration if her heart stopped or she could no longer breathe independently. The child in me wanted to scream, "That's my mom, do whatever you have to do to save her!" But it's because I was her child that I knew that's not what she would want. I was faced with the most important decision of my life, and the only person whose advice I wanted couldn't help. Ultimately, I decided the treatment should be to keep her comfortable. In the early morning hours of the next day, with just the two of us in the room, the woman who watched me take my first breath took her last. She was 62. She was light, love and selflessness personified. She spent decades going above and beyond for those around her and never asking anything in return. When I was 16, hundreds of dollars and all her spare time for weeks were spent on sewing me a dress from scratch, only for me to break up with my boyfriend two weeks before prom. Instead of being furious when I told her I would no longer need the dress she had worked so hard on, she hugged me and asked if I was OK. That's just who she was. That's why I didn't hesitate to step in when she was the one in need of care. Without my knowing, she had been preparing me for this my whole life. Serving was the blueprint for how she showed unconditional love and understanding. Her influence built the foundation on which I live my life. I wanted to make sure she spent her final weeks enshrouded in the same warmth she so freely gave to others. Though the final chapter of her life's story has ended, her legacy endures as long as I carry the best parts of her within me.
CBC
an hour ago
- CBC
Food insecurity goes up in the summer among kids in Toronto. A new city program aims to help
The school year has come to an end, and for a lot of kids in Toronto who depend on their school food programs for meals, that means an increased struggle with food insecurity. On Monday, the city of Toronto launched a CampTO Nutrition Program aimed at helping families feed their children through the summer. The initiative will provide morning snacks to up to 56,000 children at 89 designated camp locations across the city. "We know that kids or some families who may be accessing food through a student nutrition program in their school, can't access those programs during the summer," Toronto's manager of the poverty reduction office, Bryony Halpin, told CBC. "So programs like CampTO Nutrition is trying to improve access to nutritious snacks for kids who are attending city summer camps and are not getting access to food programs in their school community at that time." Halpin said child and family poverty has "sharply increased" in the city. She said that about one in four Toronto families is food insecure, and up to 60 per cent of families might be experiencing poverty in some areas of the city. "Food insecurity has been rising in Toronto in recent years at pretty alarming rates, and this is due to the increasing cost of living," she said. "Food-insecure households often choose between paying for food or paying for other needs like rent. Having a job is often not enough." Halpin said there are many impacts on kids dealing with food insecurity, including their capacity to learn in the classroom, their behaviour, long-term health outcomes, and social stigma. CampTO Nutrition Program is targeted to reach families in high-need communities, she said, with participating camps located in Free Centres and neighbourhoods with a high percentage of low-income households. The program is expected to run until late August. Organization provides meals for students during summer Susan Wright says she's "thrilled" at the city's CampTO Nutrition Program, and hopes the kids can be supported with everything they need. Wright is the founder of summerlunch+, a non-profit organization that provides meal kits for students across Ontario in the summer. She says the summer months put additional pressure on families who rely on school food meals during the school year, leading parents to make "tough choices". "Food is becoming so unaffordable for many that folks have to make tough choices sometimes between calories and nutrition," she told CBC's Metro Morning on Thursday. This year, summerlunch+ had spaces for 500 families, and 122 families are currently on the wait list, she said. Habeeb Madani, who once benefited from summerlunch+ and now works for the organization as a food packer, said the program helped him and his family. "When my parents were off to work, and I was the only one taking care of my siblings, I wouldn't know what to make, so the program has really helped me to make healthier food," he told CBC's Metro Morning on Thursday. Madani, who's now 18, said he started using summerlunch+ when he was eight years old. He got hired by the program three years ago. "It feels very full circle knowing that I'm giving back to what was very influential to me," he said. Food bank CEO says it's 'heartbreaking' In November, Toronto's Daily Bread Food Bank released a report that showed that more than one in 10 Toronto residents rely on food banks. In 2024, there were 3.5 million visits to food banks, three times as many visits as before the pandemic. One in three food bank users are children. WATCH | Daily Bread CEO talks about record of food bank use in 2024: Record food bank use a symptom of larger problem, says Daily Bread CEO 8 months ago Duration 7:48 Food banks in Toronto are seeing a million more visits this year than in the last, bringing the total number to 3.49 million from April 2023 to April 2024, according to a new report. Neil Hetherington, CEO of Daily Bread Food Bank, says it's part of a broader cost-of-living crisis. Neil Hetherington, CEO of Toronto's Daily Bread Food Bank, said food insecurity among kids also tends to rise in the summer because parents have additional expenses. "You've got to figure out child care opportunities. Are you sending that child to camp? Are you providing child care opportunities through nannies and through babysitting? Those are additional expenses for a family who is already food insecure and is already stretched," Heatherington said. He said he's seeing a lot of parents bringing their children to food banks. "One of the most heartbreaking things for me is to see children in the line at the Daily Bread Food Bank who are excited about the prospect of coming to the food bank today. It means that they'll be able to choose some food that they want to eat for dinner tonight," he said.
CTV News
6 hours ago
- CTV News
CTV National News: P.E.I. strawberry growers battle devastating plant disease
Watch CTV's Maria Sarrouh reports on a serious disease threatening P.E.I.'s strawberry crops, affecting everything from root to fruit.
