A Canadian heart patient in need of an electrocardiogram was told the appointment would be in three months

The letter added: “If the person named on this computer-generated letter is deceased, please accept our sincere apologies.”

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Anonymous
I’m quite skeptical about this story’s accuracy. In most canadian cities, if you’ve had an EKG ordered as an outpatient, the procedure is you go to a lab (there are usually a number of them available throughout a city), give the techs the requisition, and they do it on the spot. You don’t need to make an appointment at all. I’ve been to Moncton (though I haven’t worked there since med school), and I don’t see any indication things would be different there.
I suspect this guy actually had an echocardiogram ordered, and the press doesn’t know the difference. Echo can sometimes be hard to get, and Moncton isn’t a teeming metropolis-what’s more, it’s a couple of hours away from the largest tertiary-care centre in the province, which tends to suck away cardiologists and echo techs. Moncton’s also a little harder to staff sometimes because there is such a large french population that being bilingual is pretty much a job requirement there.
Three months is awhile to wait, but since we’re not immune to the ordering of “medically nonindicated” echos (“sounds like a clearly innocent murmur to me, better check it out”/patient has stable aortic stenosis for years, no symptoms-better get regular echo done to watch for progression), I can imagine many situations where 3 months isn’t really a hardship.

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