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In Our Opinion: Healthy errors

Once again the Northern Health Authority has made the news with another massive blunder.

Once again the Northern Health Authority has made the news with another massive blunder.

A radiologist at the Mills Memorial Hospital in Terrace, where many Prince Rupert patients go, was reading X-rays and scans wrong. Oops.

And once again Dr. Ronald Chapman, vice president of medicine at Northern Health, is offering the same excuses he did in August when more than 100 patients were treated with an improperly-sanitized endoscope — physicians are human, they make mistakes.

However, in this case it’s a radiologist who allegedly made the mistake, and this person has taken voluntary leave while the “quality concerns” are being investigated.

It’s not only Northern Health’s physicians and technicians making mistakes — someone should conduct an investigation of “quality concerns” of their communications department.

For the past number of months, contacting Northern Health’s “communications” department is much like a trip to a dentist’s office — it’s very much like pulling teeth.

Even when it’s a good news story, the communications department doesn’t meet deadlines and/or forgets to return calls.

And whenever a not-so-good issue arises, such as the most recent radiologist muck-up, the media line curiously doesn’t even work.

In fact, despite it being common knowledge there is a major flu bug hitting the city that spread to the seniors facility — When we called them to provide their expertise and inform the public on what the hell is really going on last week, the good public servants at Northern Health seem to have bumped their collective heads and turned into cartoon police officers who stand in front of a catastrophic incident shouting at the growing number of onlookers to: “Move along, move along, nothing to see here.”

But hold on, after a last ditch effort to get a comment mere hours before deadline, the phone rings – indeed there is an outbreak at Acropolis Manor. However, at this point, we’ve been unable to get any Northern Health “official” reports of flu, or drug overdoses anywhere else in Prince Rupert.

Maybe it’s Northern Health that needs a check-up.