Monthly Archives: June 2010

“You ask anyone from any community if they think the LHINs are looking out for their interests and they’ll tell you no,” NDP Leader Andrea Horwath told the Peterborough Examiner Thursday. “They’ve been set up to be the buffer of accountability for the government.” Horwath arrived in Peterborough as the hospital finalized its “hospital improvement plan,” which will cut more than 180 full-time equivalent positions to balance its budget. She said the shredding of local health care was “absolutely unconscionable.” … South Bruce Grey Health Centre officially took away voting rights of hospital members at their Annual General Meeting on Wednesday. The board also reduced its size from 21 to 11 and took away controversial voting rights of its CEO. Outgoing board chairman Dan Gieruszak said the vote was taken away from hospital members out of concern that special interests would “hijack” the agenda of the board. By special interests, he could very well be speaking of community members upset by how their hospital is being run. In recent years SBGHC has cut services with little consultation with the community. …. A report from the Saskatchewan Health Quality Council says one in three long term residents in that province has been given the wrong medication at some point in the year. The Council is also concerned about how often prescriptions are written for benzodiazepines, a medication prescribed for anxiety and insomnia that increases the risk of falling. … Doctors in Moncton are outraged by the suspension of a local doctor. Dr. Richard Garceau, a microbiolgoist and an infectious diseases specialist, was suspended four weeks ago without explanation. Garceau had been outspoken about the New Brunswick’s pandemic preparations. He had also criticized management of his own local hospital. “Yes, we are afraid of speaking out about this because who is the next doctor that will, like Dr. Garceau, tell what he thinks is not correct in the hospital and is there a possibility of this doctor being suspended,” Dr. Gabriel Girouard told the CBC. … A controversial UK health care CEO was awarded £190,000 (almost $300,000 Canadian dollars) after winning her court battle over a severance payment. Rose Gibb, former CEO of the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells National Health Service Trust in Kent, went to court after the government withheld severance payment she was offered in return for stepping down. Gibb left her £150,000-a-year post in October 2007, days before a highly critical report was published on the spread of Clostridium difficile (C diff) on overcrowded and dirty wards. One of the worst hospital outbreaks in the UK, it left 90 people dead. One family member who lost her mother-in-law at one of the Trust hospitals, described the decision as an “outrage” to all who lost friends and relatives through the outbreak. The board of the Trust resigned upon publication of the report. … The Metroland newspaper chain has begun running an investigative series on long term care. See

http://www.caledonenterprise.com/article/90126

Do you know where your nearest urgent care centre? Most Ontarians don’t.

In the May Vector poll, 62 per cent of Ontarians said they were not sure where their nearest urgent care centre.

Urgent care centres are intended to relieve pressure on hospital emergency departments by providing care for people who require urgent medical attention but do not have a life-threatening condition.

Having an urgent care centre does not mean communities are willing to give up their hospital emergency department.

Asked how concerned they would be if an urgent care centre replaced their emergency department, 65 per cent said they would be very or somewhat concerned.  That number was slightly higher in the Hamilton-Niagara area. The closure of two Niagara-area hospital ERs and a teen fatality following a boxing day car crash has led to extensive local debate over this issue.

The poll also asked how confident individuals were in making a self-diagnosis to determine whether they should go to an urgent care centre or a hospital. Thirty-seven per cent of Ontarians were very confident they would make the right decision, while a little over one in ten said they were not too confident or not confident at all.

In the UK the College of Emergency Medicine, which represents emergency doctors, told the Daily Telegraph in 2009 that it was concerned “urgent care” centres were acting as barriers to getting needed treatment for seriously ill patients.

“In emergency departments we are used to seeing patients who may develop serious complications,” John Heyworth, president of the CEM told the newspaper. “We want to make sure GPs appreciate the risks and handle things very carefully.

Ambulances have been reluctant to take UK patients to urgent care centres, preferring to take them to hospital emergency departments.

The poll was taken between May 6-17, 2010.  The Vector polls uses a sample of 1,101 adults across Canada, 500 in Ontario.

OTTAWA — One of the world’s leading health economists came out swinging today, shattering the myth that public health care is unsustainable and laying the blame for rising costs at the feet of private health services not covered by Medicare. The message was delivered to Members of Parliament by Dr. Robert G. Evans, an internationally renowned health economist.

“Since 1975, Medicare spending – hospitals and doctors’ services – has remained remarkably stable at between 4% and 5% of our Gross Domestic Product,” said Dr. Evans. “The key cost drivers in health care are the private, for-profit parts – pharmaceuticals, for-profit diagnostic tests, dental and other non-insured services. For example, private drug plan costs are rising 15% a year.

“Opponents of Medicare claim that public health care is fiscally unsustainable and that the only viable solution is a shift to more private coverage. Bluntly, this is a lie,” Dr. Evans said.

“Sustainability is often a code word for privatization and for-profit health care,” Dr. Evans said. “But any debate on the sustainability of public health care must start from who and what drives health care spending, and include a clear identification of the winners and losers of any erosion or dismantling of Medicare.”

Speaking to Members of Parliament and senior government advisors at a breakfast meeting on Parliament Hill, and later at a news conference on the Hill, Dr. Evans took on several of the most popular myths about health care costs. “Canada’s public health care spending is not skyrocketing,” Dr. Evans said. “In fact, our public expenditure on health care is below the OECD average.”

Dr. Evans pointed out that Medicare spending now takes up about the same share of provincial revenues it did 20 years ago. “The problem isn’t uncontrolled public health care spending,” Dr. Evans said. “It’s uncontrolled private health spending combined with a drop in provincial revenues created by large tax cuts over the years.”

Dr. Evans also dismissed the myth that the needs of an aging population will make health care unsustainable. “Population aging is a very small factor in increasing health care costs at 0.8% per year, less than other factors such as population growth (1%)”, said Dr. Evans. “Panic-mongering about a “grey tsunami” is simply a distraction.”

Canadians consistently show they support public health care. Nik Nanos, president and CEO of Nanos Research, joined Dr. Evans on Parliament Hill to present results of a recent national poll that showed almost 90% of Canadians support public solutions to problems in the health care system, and that health care is the most important national issue.

Dr. Evans, O.C., Ph.D. (Economics, Harvard), F.R.S.C., is the University Killam Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of British Columbia. His internationally respected work includes groundbreaking comparative studies of various health care systems and funding strategies.

The briefing session was hosted by the Canadian Health Coalition, a public advocacy organization dedicated to the preservation and improvement of Medicare. Its membership is comprised of national organizations representing nurses, health care workers, seniors, churches, antipoverty groups, women and trade unions as well as affiliated coalitions in nine provinces and one territory.

(From the Canadian Health Coalition)

Now that Ontario Ombuds Andre Marin has been reappointed for another five year term, he has restarted his campaign to expand his powers to the MUSH sector – municipalities, universities, school boards and hospitals. Marin told the Toronto Star yesterday that the Premier and his health minster regularly paint “doomsday scenarios” of health care consuming 70 per cent of government spending within 12 years. Yet “we still have no investigative body that can number-crunch the performance independently of hospitals.” The Ombuds’ example is one that has raised much interest, particularly with the frequency in which the government uses this statistic. While presently out of the jurisdiction of the Ombuds’, on Thursday a group of economists are meeting with the Canadian Health Coalition in Ottawa to also discuss these claims. What is within the Ombuds’ jurisdiction are the Local Health Integration Networks, of which Marin will soon be issuing a report. The government must have some idea of what is in that report — the LHINs were given new guidelines earlier in the year around their spending practices.

To read more on these claims, see

https://opseudiablogue.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/bad-math-in-the-provincial-budget/