Thanks to staff at KGH ER

KGH Emergeny has got a lot of negative attention over the years. Long wait times, staffing shortages and parking disasters lead people to think the community isn’t being well cared for.

I’m sure sometimes that’s the case, but it certainly wasn’t our experience.

My daughter woke up at 1:30 a.m., struggling to breathe. We brought her to KGH, where we were quickly and kindly greeted and reassured.

She was on a monitor, receiving treatment and feeling better within 20 minutes of our arrival.

The staff were professional, competent and incredibly friendly given the intensity of their work environment and the hour of the day. We were home after a couple hours of monitoring, and my daughter is not traumatized in any way. In fact, she is talking about the “nice lady” and “the doctor” who helped her feel so much better.

I couldn’t be more grateful.

Yes, sometimes the health-care system fails us, or fails our community. But, the souls who work in that system see us at our worst, when we are least receptive, most stressed and often unable to think rationally. And yet they continue to provide us with evidence-based, quality healthcare that not many in this world have the privilege of receiving. On top of that, they somehow maintain compassion. 

We can continue to be dissatisfied with Interior Health and our health-care system as a whole and advocate for just allocation of funding and services. But, I just wanted to ensure that those frontline healthcare workers know how much they were appreciated.

Vanessa Heerschop