For example, I worked through the SARS crisis. I'm actually the doctor who looked after the most patients with SARS in B.C. I looked after two patients. That was a true crisis. We were very frightened of what was happening to the public and to us, as health professionals, and were even more alarmed by what was happening in Toronto and China. In that case, we all received email and paper bulletins from the hospital administration alerting us to what was going on.
Now, norovirus, or so-called Norwalk-type virus, presents a crisis in a hospital because people and staff get sick and wards have to be closed. We get a temporary crisis once every few months in which we're alerted by the hospital. We got no such alert that I'm aware of in British Columbia. And speaking with a colleague in nuclear medicine yesterday, he confirmed that the nuclear medicine specialists who were apportioning tests did not perceive any crisis. They were handling the situation.
The other intriguing thing that I guess made me send an email to As It Happens and that led to an interview, which now leads to me appearing before you, is having run into a senior radiation oncologist from the BC Cancer Agency, just while signing off records in the medical records room. I asked him, “Did you perceive a crisis in December?” and his answer was, “Well, no, we had a contingency plan at the Cancer Agency”.
I think if there had been perceived to be a crisis, senior administrative people in B.C. would have alerted us to that, perhaps even the Ministry of Health.