When patients arrive at the emergency department at Prince County Hospital in Summerside, Dr. Kay Dingwell expects to treat people who are seriously ill.
Instead, she said every shift includes people waiting hours just for a piece of paper for their boss.
“That person has been sitting beside chemo patients, newborn babies and frail elderly people in my waiting room for 12 hours because they know that they don’t actually require medical care, but just need someone to say this person is sick and shouldn’t go to work,” Dingwell said.
“It’s common sense. It shouldn’t require me.”
Dingwell said the situation is frustrating for everyone involved, from employees who may give up waiting and go to work sick, the co-workers or vulnerable people they interact with, to health-care workers already stretched thin.
“My job is to provide health care to Islanders. My job is not to fill out forms for employers,” Dingwell said. “This is public dollars being put into policing employee attendance.”
Dingwell and other physicians on P.E.I. say they’re fed up with spending public health-care time writing sick notes to satisfy private workplace rules, debate has resurfaced over whether the requirement should be scrapped altogether.
A labour law expert said the Island may be clinging to an approach much of the country is slowly leaving behind.
“There’s been a real trend across the country over the last five years to really push back against this practice of requiring sick notes for short‑term...
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