Revised - A Whitehorse doctor has made some scathing remarks on the state of health care in the Yukon and in Whitehorse General Hospital’s emergency room.

On his social media feed, Dr. Rao Tadepalli has posted: “Canada has become a disastrous place as far as health care incl(uding) Whitehorse, Yukon.

“In (emergency department) full of admitted patients. Dangerous to patients and atrocious work conditions,” said Tadepalli, who held the presidency of the Yukon Medical Association (YMA) for several years.

Current YMA president Dr. Alex Kmet was more circumspect in his remarks when contacted by the Star on Wednesday.

In a prepared statement, Kmet wrote, “The health care system across Canada is in crisis, and the Yukon is not immune to the challenges that the rest of our country is facing.

“While the Yukon has its own protective factors and unique vulnerabilities, the factors affecting the rest of the country impact us here as well,” he said.

Kmet added to his remarks by saying, “The Canadian Medical Association has been speaking out about the challenges facing ER wait times across Canada and has some summarized insight on their website.”

He also had some measured praise for the Yukon government’s efforts to help address the problems.

“One of the positive developments that we’ve seen here at home is the government’s recent Health Human Resources Strategy.

“In this strategy, we see support for the YMA-created YukonDocs program along with support to increase capacity for medical education,” Kmet said.

“We are excited that our government supports increasing the education and training of family doctors in the territory and we believe that a family medicine residency training program based in the Yukon will be one of our best recruitment pipelines for family doctors over the long term.”

Jessica Apolloni, a spokesperson for the hospital, provided a statement to the Star about the situation.

“We all agree, that the pressures on the system are due to increased population, need and complexity, health human resource constraints and inflationary costs. Our emergency departments are busier, wait times are longer in many areas and hospital bed availability is very limited on most days,” she pointed out.

“Despite this, no services have ‘closed’; in fact, over the last few months (and with support from the Government of Yukon), we’ve increased services such as medical imaging and surgical services. We anticipate, in these areas alone, our teams will provide more exams and procedures this year than any year before.”

According to Apolloni’s figures, the emergency department is on track to see more than 37,000 visits this year, which would be a new high mark.

“While Yukoners may experience longer waits at busier times, their overall time in hospital receiving emergency care is reasonable compared to other jurisdictions in Canada,” she said.