The recent announcement by the North Shore Health Network (NSHN) that the emergency department in Thessalon would once again be temporarily closed this past weekend due to doctor shortages—with patients advised to call 911 and ambulances re-routed to NSHN Blind River Site, NSHN Richards Landing-Matthews Site or the Sault Area Hospital—is another clarion call that things are not trending well in health care.
Kudos must go out to the Island’s family health teams for taking heroic measures in order to keep the same from happening here on Manitoulin Island once the locum pool that has enabled keeping the doors open at the Manitoulin Health Centre’s ERs dry up in October. But it is the patients who are being cast adrift who must bear the burden of a health care system that falls far short of what should be expected in a First World nation such as ours.
Ontario is Canada’s most populous province and yet it boasts the lowest nurse/patient per capita rating in the nation. As Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles noted on her recent visit to the Island, three million Ontarians do not have access to a family doctor—with the announcements of Dr. Barss leaving for Ottawa, Dr. Quackenbush quitting family medicine and Dr. McKeracher trimming her practice down to manageable levels more than a thousand Manitoulin residents are soon to join their ranks in October.
This is unconscionable and, with apologies to Ms. Stiles, is a pox on all political houses. This “crisis” did not come to pass overnight, but is rather the result of successive provincial governments failing to meet the needs of the future by focussing on immediate political expediency.
That failure could be said to have begun when the federal Liberal government of Jean Chretien brought the national books out of the red and into the black largely by cutting transfers meant to help maintain the universal national health system. From a 50/50 cost sharing with the province those transfers dropped to barely 25 percent—with promises to rebalance the scales sometime in the future. That future never came, then the books went wildly into the red as a new sheriff came to town in the form of Stephen Harper and his merry brand of reunited Conservatives.
The parsimonious approach of the Mike Harris Progressive Conservatives kept the lid on health care spending and public service wages in Ontario, to the ever-spiralling detriment of filling the ranks of soon to be retiring doctors and making careers in nursing less and less attractive.
Truth be told, limiting the number of spaces in Ontario medical schools did have the result of keeping health care costs down—but now Ontario’s most vulnerable citizens are paying the price. No provincial government stepped up to the plate to remedy the impending crisis—so now we the people are paying the piper.
The Conservative game plan in health care is to privatize—gutting the universal health care system by a literal death of a thousand cuts and then proposing to solve the problem they have created, at least in part, by falling back on market forces. (Read user fees imposed by private clinics.) It is an approach that blithely ignores the added costs of maintaining profits and offering the time-worn canard of the market “finding efficiencies” to offset them.
Throwing money at the problem won’t solve the problem we are told, even though the current crisis itself was created by starving the system of funds over several decades of various partisan flavours being in charge. Nobody was willing to spend the money—not Bob Rae’s NDP (albeit hamstrung by a severe recession), not the succeeding Progressive Conservative governments of Mike Harris or Liberal governments of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne, and certainly not the current government of Doug Ford (who seems obsessed with bigger and better Southern Ontario highways, reducing green spaces to aid the deep pockets of his daughter’s developers’ wedding guests—not to mention a billion or so to ensure easier access to alcohol for one and all over the age of 19).
The current health care crisis was not made in a day or by one government, and it will not be solvable over the short term given the length of time it takes to train doctors and the escalating deterioration of working conditions—especially here in the North—that make family medicine or nursing a less than palatable career option.
We have been, and continue to be, very fortunate to have the family health teams that serve our communities, and The Expositor applauds the courage and ingenuity they are applying to finding solutions.
It is unconscionable that some members in our community take it upon themselves to harass and attempt to intimidate local doctors during a time when they, and their families, are under increasing and unsustainable levels of stress.
We have so much to offer and to share. Manitoulin, as a community, must make every effort to ensure doctors coming to our beloved paradise feel both welcome and safe if we are to weather a storm that promises to get much worse before it gets better.
