Under LHIN investigation, northern hospital files $500,000 legal action against activists

Posted on March 21, 2013 | 1 comment

A northern Ontario hospital and two senior staff have initiated a $500,000 legal claim against a group of nine activists opposing formal amalgamation as the North East LHIN has begun its own separate investigation into complaints about the hospital.

Among the nine activists is Jim Brown, the former Mayor of Iroquois Falls.

Anger has been confused by finger-pointing over responsibility for the amalgamation proposal.

The North East LHIN is denying claims made by hospital CEO Bruce Peterkin that it is pressuring three hospital boards to amalgamate in Cochrane, Iroquois Falls and Black River-Matheson. They instead put the proposal back on Peterkin, describing it as a volunteer integration.

Getting staff consensus on the formal amalgamation would not be difficult — at present all three hospitals share one administration, with Peterkin serving as CEO of all three. The three hospitals share services under the umbrella of the MICs Group of Health Services.

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$12.4 billion in tax revenue lost due to recession, not overspending — CCPA

Posted on March 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

Officially Ontario ended its recession in 2009, but the effects still linger in 2013.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives estimates the “great recession” of 2008-09 and the slow recovery has taken the Ontario economy $70 billion off course. That means $12.4 billion in lost annual revenues to government – or more than our current deficit.

Austerity has not been successful in other jurisdictions, yet the Wynne government has so far said it will stay the course, impacting public services including health care.

The United Kingdom has now endured a triple-dip recession as a result of deep cuts in public spending by the Cameron government. Could more austerity by the federal, provincial and municipal governments send our own economy into negative territory, impacting both private and public sectors?

Traditional thinking has been you stimulate during lean years and grow out of your deficits in more flush times. In 2003 the Conservative government left Ontario a surprise deficit of $5.5 billion. Despite significant reinvestment in the public sector – including health – the province was able to quickly grow out of the deficit and run three years of balanced budgets.

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Not all home and community care receiving increases this year

Posted on March 18, 2013 | Leave a comment

It’s always been an odd concept to us to separate out hospitals from other community-based providers. If hospitals are not operating in their communities, where the heck are they operating? It also makes little sense when the watchword these days is “integration.”

The reality is that hospitals are health care citadels within their communities and attract far more community involvement than some of the so-called private for-profit “community-based” health care providers the government seems to be taken with.

Walk into the lobby of any hospital and you’ll likely see an information desk with volunteers from the community sitting behind it. If you’ve had heart surgery recently, you’ll have probably received a visit by a hospital volunteer who is there to answer your questions. Community volunteers are key to making fundraising foundations work for hospitals. Hospitals likely couldn’t function without them.

Unlike some of the province-wide private agencies, hospital boards are mostly made up of people who live in the community. They are much closer to the local communities than say the boards of the non-profit St. Elizabeth Healthcare or the for-profit Bayshore Home Health.

It is therefore with great interest that we note not all home and community care providers are receiving increases this year despite the government’s rhetoric about shifting services away from hospitals. That’s because some of this work is actually done by hospitals.

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Ontario’s nursing homes — 10 years of empty promises from Queen’s Park

Posted on March 15, 2013 | 7 comments

Here we go again. This week news of another shocking nursing home death – this time in The Wexford, a Scarborough long term care residence. A second resident was also injured in the resident-on-resident attack.

Health Minister Deb Matthews predictably told the Toronto Star “if there is anything that can be learned from this incident, you have my commitment that action will be taken.”

In 2003 then Health Minister George Smitherman was moved to tears after a Toronto Star series on resident abuse. His famously vowed a “revolution” in long-term care.

In 2005 a Coroner’s jury made 85 recommendations after investigating the 2001 deaths of two residents at the hands of another in a different Toronto-area nursing home.

At the time the report was released, the home’s lawyer suggested there was a gap in the system for specialized long-term care units for residents with cognitive impairment (today that describes almost a third of all long-term care residents).

Smitherman declined comment that time.

In 2008 David Caplan was asked about a Canadian Press series that showed three-quarters of Ontario long-term care homes were not in compliance with provincial legislation. Caplan said he was too new to the post to comment and promised nothing.

In 2010 Metroland, which operates community newspapers across Ontario, ran its own series on long-term care. They called it “Situation Critical.”

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Who is that new guy on the banner?

Posted on March 14, 2013 | Leave a comment

His name is Ed Arvelin. He is a Registered Practical Nurse (RPN) with St. Joseph’s Care Group in Thunder Bay. He is  as also Chair of OPSEU’s Mental Health Division. Patients at the Thunder Bay mental health facility can be there for three months or sometimes the rest of their lives. This often builds a close relationship between caregiver and patient. Ed says these patients feel like an extended family.  To watch a short video of Ed, click the window below.

Would you like to live on the Diablogue banner for a month or two? We’re looking to profile the hundreds of professions that make up the 43,000 members represented by OPSEU’s Health Care Divisional Council. Whether you cook in a hospital, travel to client homes to deliver physiotherapy, or work in a public health unit, we’d like to feature you. It just involves a couple of pictures and a short video profile. Contact rjanson@opseu.org if you are a OPSEU health care member and would like to promote your profession on our banner. Don’t be shy! We’ll be looking for someone new in April.

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Kingston P3 Plebiscite: Kenney memo to Providence Care staff misleading

Posted on March 14, 2013 | Leave a comment

Kingston’s Providence Care took the extraordinary step of sending a memo to staff on Tuesday stating that the proposed new psychiatric and rehab hospital will remain public.

The new hospital is presently going through a competition to select a private for-profit consortium to design, build, finance and maintain the new 270-bed hospital for 30 years.

“You may get the wrong impression from the P3 (Private Public Partnership) slogans being used,” CEO Dale Kenney writes. “Partnership is defined as ownership in a business and I can assure you that Providence Care is not entering into partnership with the private sector to build our hospital.”

Kenney insists that the project is instead being built under Ontario’s Alternative Finance and Procurement model (AFP).

Kenney is likely trying to rescue the beleaguered MPP John Gerretsen, who sees the new hospital as his legacy project. The fact that the private sector has been invited into a pricey long-term relationship with the hospital is sticking in the craw of many unhappy Kingston residents and members of City Council.

If last night’s packed organizing meeting at the new pro-public campaign headquarters of the Kingston Health Coalition is any indication, there is high community interest in this decision. Volunteers are coming to the campaign with considerable motivation.

This idea that somehow an AFP is different from a P3 is complete nonsense. Nobody believes this – not even the promoters of such projects. The Canadian Council for Public Private Partnerships lists the new St. Mary’s/Providence hospital as a P3. Yet we don’t see Kenney or an Infrastructure Ontario trying to correct that very public record.

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Deb Matthews enters paid blood donation debate

Posted on March 13, 2013 | Leave a comment

Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews has asked Health Canada to delay licensing of three new clinics that would pay donors for blood plasma.

The new clinics represent a fundamental change in how we treat blood donations in Canada and is contrary to the recommendations of both the Krever Inquiry and the World Health Organization.

Two private clinics have been set up in Toronto, and a third is planned for Hamilton. The three cannot open until they get licensing approval from Health Canada.

We first learned about these clinics almost a year ago when Canadian Blood Services announced it was closing its last remaining dedicated plasma collection site in Thunder Bay.

At that time we wrote to all provincial health ministers — including Deb Matthews  — as well as Federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq. The NDP’s France Gelinas asked questions for us on the floor of the legislature. We even circulated two petitions which were also introduced into both Federal and Provincial Parliaments. Outside of Thunder Bay, the media treated the story with indifference despite our efforts.

A year ago we thought it odd that CBS was telling us on one hand that there was an oversupply of plasma, while on the other hand a private company was setting up shop in the province to collect substantially more. CBS’ own annual report showed they were also increasing imports of American plasma.

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Could the Wynne government do a u-turn on austerity?

Posted on March 13, 2013 | 1 comment

It didn’t get much coverage in the mainstream media, but last week the big banks told Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to take his foot off the brake when it comes to public sector spending.

The banks argue with a weakening economy, now is not the time for restraint. That could mean pushing back Ottawa’s target to wipe out a $26 billion federal budget deficit by $5 billion per year.

“You won’t have many economists — or the bond market, which is perhaps a more critical vote — end up criticizing Canada if a couple of years down the road, instead of having a balanced budget, we have a $2 or $3 billion deficit,” CIBC chief economist Avery Shenfeld told the Toronto Star last week.

It’s a rare meeting of minds – the same message is being delivered by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, who argue economic growth is more important right now than the deficit.

Private sector economists are predicting economic growth in Canada will slow to 1.5 per cent for 2013.

If the economists left and right are telling Flaherty this, then Ontario’s Wynne government must be receiving the same message. This is important — if the provinces and the federal government are rowing in opposite directions, their initiatives would likely cancel each other out.

You can also bet that new Ontario finance Minister Charles Sousa – who emerged from the world of banking – is also listening to his former colleagues.

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If hospital cuts are restructuring, then let’s see the evidence

Posted on March 11, 2013 | Leave a comment

There is little question that a provincial freeze in base hospital operating funding is motivating the present shedding of staff positions and services across the province.

Hospitals are required to balance their budgets by law, but Local Health Integration Networks regularly extend exemptions conditional on the hospital following an improvement plan worked out between the LHIN and the hospital.

Hospital CEOs and LHIN officials are usually reluctant to admit that significant budget cuts will impact service delivery, even if the impact is obvious in examples where hundreds of staff positions are lost (ie. Peterborough Regional). That’s because significant changes in service delivery should be treated as an integration decision, a 60-day process that puts on the onus on the service provider(s) to make a case for change in delivery to the LHIN. That case usually includes evidence of community consultation.

With the latest round of hospital cuts the Health Minister and Premier are suggesting what is taking place is not belt tightening, but restructuring.

If that is the case, then why not have the LHINs treat these changes as integration decisions where all the facts are put on the table and the community is consulted?

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Integration process missing from new round of hospital cuts

Posted on March 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

Local Health Integration Networks were purportedly created to bring health care planning, integration, accountability, and funding closer to the 14 regions they serve. A key role for the LHINs was to engage their regional communities in this process. The Ministry of Health and Long Term Care was supposed to set the strategic directions, and the LHINs were supposed to operationalize them within the context of regional planning.

While the Health Minister has mused about further empowering the LHINs, recent signs suggest that perhaps the opposite is taking place.

The South Bruce Grey Health Centre is a case in point. Comprised of four small hospitals working under one umbrella, the Ministry of Health is not exempting SBGHC from implementation of the new funding formula. Small hospitals were supposed to be excluded from a funding system that was becoming far more reliant on volumes that rural communities could not possibly muster. By sharing resources, the four small rural hospitals that operate as SBGHC are over the budgetary threshold for exemption. SBGHC has an operating budget of $43 million – a pittance compared to some of Ontario’s billion dollar urban behemoths like The Ottawa Hospital or Hamilton Health Sciences.

SBGHC took their case to the South West LHIN and they agreed implementation of the formula on this hospital would be unfair. It would also throw SBGHC $700,000 further in debt next year if they failed to cut needed services. Continue reading →

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