Smoking-related illnesses make up nearly a quarter of the patient visits to the region’s hospital.
More than 500 patients visited the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre in 2012 for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease alone. Smoking is a main cause for the lung disease. If caught early enough the disease is manageable and treatable.
About 11 per cent of Ontarians have COPD and according to a recent study by Toronto-based Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, those patients make up a quarter of all hospital visits across the province.
Mark Henderson, executive vice-president for chronic disease prevention and management at the regional hospital, said patients with COPD make up a majority of the visits to the hospital and contribute to the gridlock problem.
“It’s really a major scourge to health and to health-care delivery,” Henderson said. “It’s a huge burden on the health-care system. Northwestern Ontario has a high prevalence of smoking compared to the rest of Ontario.
“We have a lot of COPD in our community and it does generate a lot of admissions to the emergency department and it generates a lot of admissions to hospital.”
The hospital admitted 677 patients to the ER last year for acute treatment. Those patients were discharged after a few hours.
Henderson said sometimes a patient with COPD could have bronchitis, which can make the person acutely unwell and a simple cold can become much worse if someone has the disease.
Under the right conditions, the situation can be fatal.
But smoking doesn’t exclusively cause problems to the lungs.
Smoking has been linked to various cancers including lung and stomach.
Henderson believes the best method for stopping people from smoking is having them not develop the addiction in the first place. He said it’s better to education instead of imposing bans.
“If everybody stopped smoking now, in 10 years we’d have a dramatically different health-care picture,” he said.
He said the hospital is already working on the problem by developing partners with the city’s school boards. The hospital also offers nicotine replacement theory programs.
He added there’s programs and help available but it is up to the patient to make the first step.
