Queen’s Park: Buildings matter. Health care delivery? Not so much.

Posted on April 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

The next election appears to be set up to be fought over the bricks and mortars of health care, and not the quality of the system itself.

Liberals are using robocalls in Halton to urge constituents to call their MPP and urge her to vote for the provincial budget lest the $300 million redevelopment of Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital be placed in jeopardy.

The Liberals felt no compulsion about doing the same around Grimsby’s West Lincoln Memorial hospital redevelopment or five other projects that were taken off the table in the same provincial budget. Five of six of these projects are in provincial Tory ridings.

“Their decisions are not about health care. Their decisions about what hospitals to fund have become part of a political game,” PC leader Tim Hudak told the Hamilton Spectator.

According to the Spectator, Burlington MPP Jane McKenna received more than 1,000 calls to her office as a result of robocalling that started Monday.

While hospitals are telling us about impending layoffs due to a base budget freeze, at Queen’s Park the real battle is over the buildings, not the care delivered in those buildings.

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Playing political games with the safety of our blood system

Posted on April 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

The story in quotes:

“IVIG is a product made from large pools of human plasma and it is not possible to claim with certainty that there is no risk of infectious disease transmission.” – From Guidelines for the Use of Intravenous Immune Globulin (IVIG) for Neurologic Conditions, by Tom Feasby, Brenda Banwell, et al. April 2007.

“WHO recommends the following integrated strategy for the provision of safe blood and blood products and safe, efficacious blood transfusions…Collection of blood from voluntary, non-remunerated blood donors at low risk of infections that can be transmitted through blood and blood products, the phasing out of family/replacement donation and the elimination of paid donation.”—From Screening Donated Blood for Transfusion-Transmissible Infections, Recommendations, World Health Organization, 2010.

“We value your time. There are several ways we would like to show you how much we appreciate your continued generosity. You may choose one of the easy methods for collecting your earnings: direct credit to your bank account, cheques, or prepaid Visa cards.” – Website, Canadian Plasma Resources (ExaPharma), a private company that has applied to Health Canada to open two Plasma Donor Clinics in Toronto.

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Revisiting Wisconsin: Could it happen here?

Posted on April 17, 2012 | 2 comments

Imagine a one page collective agreement. It has one thing on it – your wage.
At that, your union bargaining team is prohibited from negotiating a settlement above the present rate of the Consumer Price Index, regardless of where your wages are comparative to others. Only a public referendum could approve a larger increase.

There’s no grievance procedure. Vacation, benefits and pension are all decided unilaterally by the employer, as is the terms of severance. It is not collective bargaining but collective begging for most terms and conditions.

This is the situation public sector workers in Wisconsin are facing as last year’s massive demonstrations culminate in a recall vote for Governor Scott Walker in June. Tens of thousands have quit, walking away from one of a handful of States that is still experiencing negative job growth.

According to Paul Secunda, a labour law professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, even if the recall is successful, it is unlikely the reviled anti-labour Act 10 will be reversed given gerrymandering by the Republicans who overwhelmingly control the State House of Assembly.

Secunda spoke last night as a guest of Ryerson University’s Centre for Labour Management Relations.

Not all Wisconsin public sector workers share these limitations – firefighters, police and paramedics are exempted. All were considered supporters of Walker, but took to the streets with their public service colleagues to protest the anti-labour legislation.

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Private Toronto company plans to pay for donations of plasma

Posted on April 17, 2012 | 2 comments

Health Canada has received an application by an private for-profit company to operate two plasma collection sites in Toronto.

This comes on the heels of Canadian Blood Services closing down its last dedicated plasma collection site in Thunder Bay last week.

The company, ExaPharma, appears to be run by members of the Toronto Iranian community, the center’s manager an orthopaedic surgeon who had previously worked for the Iran Hemophilia Society.

Most are relatively new graduates, including President Yalda Riahi, a lawyer who was called to the bar in 2011 and works for a Vaughan-area law firm. Her background? According to the web site of Rotundo Di Iorio Quaglietta, she specializes in commercial and personal injury litigation.

While ExaPharma states on its website that it “has an uncompromising commitment to quality and strict adherence to all regulations and guidelines,” it appears to ignore one of the biggest World Health Organization guidelines – donations should not be paid.

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Hospital quality issues picked out from the fast moving stream

Posted on April 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

We sometimes get asked about how we come up with stories for the Diablogue? For us, it’s not a matter of finding stories, but prioritizing material culled from a fast-moving stream.

Last week we focussed on the outrageous decision by Canadian Blood Services to increase imports of American-sourced plasma products while closing the last dedicated Canadian plasma donor clinic in Thunder Bay.

However, there are many issues out there, and only limited BLOG time for us. Here’s just a taste of some of the stories we missed last week:

Part of the fallout from the provincial budget is the decision to postpone a number of capital projects, including new hospitals. Nowhere is this being more felt that in Grimsby, where the community is upset that the new $138.8 million rebuild of the West Lincoln Memorial Hospital has been put on the shelf. The “Rallying for WLMH Committee” has called for a “massive rally” May 2nd. When the hospital faced closure in 1997, more than 7,000 people came out in a similar planned rally.

A new CIHI (Canadian Institute for Health Information) report raised eyebrows when Lakeridge Health and the University Health Network came out at the bottom of list of GTA hospitals. Lakeridge (with sites in Oshawa, Port Perry, Bowmanville and Whitby) pointed out that according to CIHI data, they were doing better than the provincial average on six of seven clinical performance indicators. That includes 80 per cent better than the provincial average when it comes to readmission after hip replacement surgery, and 30 per cent better on knee replacement surgery. An on-line tool that CIHI developed to rate hospitals crashed after it was swamped with users following a front page story in the Toronto Star.

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Petition asks for higher Canadian content in blood products

Posted on April 13, 2012 | 1 comment

Following the closure of the Thunder Bay Plasma Donor Clinic this week — the last of its kind in Canada — a petition is being circulating urging the Ontario government to use its influence to pursue Canadian Blood Services to increase the Canadian content in its blood plasma products.

CBS had originally agreed to do as much back in 2004, when the deputy ministers asked that the content of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) be increased from 24 per cent to 40 per cent within four years. Today Canadian content is at 25 per cent as CBS shutters its Canadian plasma collection centre.

CBS is replacing Canadian plasma with imported U.S. FDA approved plasma product. U.S. FDA plasma was at the heart of the tainted blood scandal in the early 1990s. The U.S. FDA had approved exports of infected plasma extracted from Arkansas prisoners. 95 per cent of Canadian hemophiliacs were infected with hepatitis C, leading to the Krever Inquiry.

Help us get signatures in your community! Download the PDF petition here: CBS Petition Ontario.

A similiar petition is also being drafted for the Federal Minister of Health.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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How does your pay stack up globally?

Posted on April 13, 2012 | 1 comment

The world’s payroll is $70 trillion U.S. What is your share relative to people living in other countries?

Economists with the International Labour Organization have done a comparison of 72 countries, adjusting income by purchasing power.

Expressed in monthly PPP – purchasing power parity dollars – while wealthy, Canada falls below many countries, including the Republic of Korea, Austria, the United States, Ireland, France and of course those high tax Nordic countries – Sweden, Norway, and Finland. If you are looking for the highest standard of living, move to Luxembourg, which tops the list. The average Canadian earns 66 per cent of what the average citizen of Luxembourg earns.

While income plays an important role in good health, the chart makes no allowances for how that income is distributed within these countries.

The BBC has set up a web site where you can compare your pre-tax salary. Click here.

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CBS: Can we please learn some lessons here?

Posted on April 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

You may have seen this story before.

Recently Canadian Blood Services said it was increasing imports of “surplus” plasma from the United States, assuring us it is FDA approved.

In 2009/10 CBS imported 10,000 units. In 2010/11 it was doubled to 20,000 units.

In the 1980s the U.S. FDA also approved shipments of plasma product to Canada and other countries around the globe.

While the U.S. FDA was happy to approve the export of this product in the 1980s, they wouldn’t allow it for U.S. use since 1984.

Why? It came from an Arkansas prison, where HIV and Hepatitus C was widespread among inmates.

Arkansas was one of the few U.S. states that did not pay inmates for the work they performed in the corrections system. However, selling their blood was considered a legitimate way to make money in prison that was “considered acceptable to the citizens of Arkansas” according the Arkansas Times. And of course, the Arkansas Department of Corrections took their cut of the revenue.

When this blood was sold around the world – including here in Canada — it created a tainted blood scandal that took the lives of thousands of innocent victims.

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Video: Rally to save the Thunder Bay CBS Plasma Donation Centre

Posted on April 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

Politicians, donors, staff and union officials rallied outside Canadian Blood Services’ Thunder Bay Plasma Donation Centre on April 11, 2012.

CBS is plans on closing the centre April 12, placing 28 staff out of work.

While it claims it does not need the 10,800 annual units of plasma from donors in Thunder Bay, CBS notes in its last annual report that it is importing 20,000 units of “surplus” plasma from the United States.

To watch a video of today’s rally, click below.

April 11 rally at CBS Thunder Bay Plasma Donation Centre

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Hospitals: I am a dinosaur. Hear me roar.

Posted on April 7, 2012 | 1 comment

This is what we’re all expected to believe: if you cut the funding from hospitals and give it to community-based care, our health system will become more effective and sustainable.

The people who say hospitals should be nothing but acute care centers appear to be winning the debate on health care reform despite a lack of evidence to support their views. Those of us who suggest otherwise are quickly labelled dinosaurs.

Even the warm and friendly Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives appears to be getting in on the act, suggesting in their federal alternative budget that as long as the community services remain not-for-profit, all will be well. They recommend an increasing share of federal transfers should be used to enhance primary and community-based care, not to support hospitals.

When we think about expensive hospitals, we think about beds.

And yet, the CCPA acknowledges that Canada already has the highest rate of day surgery in the world – an average of 87 per cent of all surgeries.

They point out that hospitals have only increased slightly as a percentage of spending relative to the size of the economy, from 3 per cent in the 1970s to 3.4 per cent in 2009. That’s more than 30 years.

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