Conference Board comes up with phoney alliance to scare Canadians out of their right to public health care

Posted on May 13, 2011 | 1 comment

The Conference Board of Canada is the latest organization to try and scare Canadians out of public Medicare.

Launching the “Canadian Alliance for Sustainable Health Care,” the Conference Board opens with a statement that is full of distortions of fact. This is not research, it’s propaganda.

In an op/ed, Anne Golden and David Stewart Patterson use every wrong cliché in the book to try and convince us that “if we continue to treat health care soley as an essential public service, as a sacred entitlement of Canadian citizenship, we are doomed to perpetuate the trend towards higher costs, higher taxes, longer lineups and wait times and growing frustration.”

It’s not hard to read between the lines that the Conference Board is challenging the right of Canadians to public access of quality health care.

The two ignore the fact that wait times have been coming down, that spending on health care has recently shrunk as a percentage of program spending and GDP, that taxes have been cut, particularly for corporations. They say the cost to the Federal government goes up by six per cent per year. But that’s because the Federal and Provincial governments agreed on such an escalator in part to rectify an imbalance between Federal and Provincial contributions to health care. They make the assumption that treating health as an essential service perpetuates higher costs. Would making health unessential make it any cheaper? This is ridiculous.

They say that the time has come to move beyond “rhetorical nostrums” but instead perpetuate their own out-of-date myths about the health care system. Like other propagandists, they prefer to use numbers from the height of the recession than more recent data in making their arguments.

The title “Canadian Alliance” suggests that it is the sum of a group of organizations working with the Conference Board. In reality, it is the Conference Board.

In its statement the Conference Board doesn’t do much to differentiate total health care spending and total public health care spending. They ignore their own charts that show countries with more public and less private health care tend to spend less. They ignore the fact that among the G7 nations, Canada is second only to the U.S. in the amount of private health care in the system.

They say we need to be more efficient, pointing to Japan as a model. It is hard to believe their business members would tolerate a government that bans profits for health insurance, aggressively sets the price of drugs, pays it professionals poorly and has the lowest rate of privatization.

Nor do we think the Conference Board would applaud if we concentrated more of our health system in hospitals, as the Japanese do. Japan has about three times as many beds per capita as Canada. Even with this, hospitals are crowded. There are shortages of obstetricians, anaesthesiologists and emergency room specialists due to low pay, long hours and high levels of stress. Japanese primary care doctors, according to the Washington Post, make up for low treatment fees through astonishingly high volumes, turning their clinics into assembly lines.

While Ontarians may not like Dalton McGuinty’s health care premiums, they would like Japan’s even less – it’s set a four per cent of income. Instead of an individual who earns $100,000 paying a premium of $600 here in Ontario, in Japan you would be paying $4,000.

The Conference Board also misleads by talking about rankings, not on actual numbers. The difference between the life expectancy of Canadians and the Japanese is two years. In the past decade life expectancy of Canadians has increased by close to three years.

There is no question we could do better in the delivery of health care. But please, let’s get a grip and have a debate based on some level of reality.

1 Comment

Posted in Health System

Tagged , , , ,

A bad month for transparency and accountability

Posted on May 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

Private member bills seldom get passed at the legislature. Perhaps it was for that reason Bill 183 received little attention after the Liberal majority defeated it May 5th.

The NDP authored Bill was intended to expand the scope of the Ombudsman to include universities, colleges, hospitals, long-term care homes, school boards, children’s aid societies, and retirement homes. The Bill would have also given the Ombudsman an oversight role over the independent police review director.

Ontario is unique in barring the ombudsman from investigations into these sectors.

The Liberals argued in the legislature that these bodies already have sufficient oversight. In the case of hospitals, they argued hospital boards and LHINs provide this role. However, hospital boards and LHINs are decision-makers, and as such, have an interest in defending those decisions.

In fact, most LHINs have a staff of about 30 or slightly more. They also have about 200 health care providers to which they negotiate and sign accountability agreements. They are responsible for community engagement, funding, integration decisions, managing projects, as well as collecting and assessing key health care indicators. They are responsible for developing integrated health service plans for their regions. The thought that they could do all this and provide reasonable oversight to investigate complaints by individuals into hospital or long term care homes is absurd.

Surely the Liberals understand this.

However, the McGuinty government has been stung by a number of scandals, many of them health-related. Let’s not forget e-Health. The Ombudsman’s report on the LHINs, “The LHIN Spin,” was undoubtedly fresh in their mind as they contemplated this private member’s bill.

Together with Schedule 15 of Bill 173 (see related articles), it has not been a good month for transparency and accountability in the province of Ontario.

For the record, these were the MPPs in the legislature who voted down Bill 183:

Laura Albanese, Wayne Arthurs, Bas Balkissoon, Lorenzo Berardinetti, Margarett Best, Laurel Broten, Vic Dhillon, Kevin Flynn, Helena Jaczek, Kuldip Kular, Monte Kwinter, Amrit Mangat, Reza Moridi, Leeanna Pendergast, Gerry Phillips, Shafiq Qaadri, Khalil Ramal, Lou Rinaldi, Tony Ruprecht, Liz Sandals, Mario Sergio, and Charles Sousa.

Leave a comment

Posted in Health System

Tagged , , , , , ,

The trouble with LHINs Part II – How do you integrate half a system?

Posted on May 11, 2011 | 2 comments

One of the key problems with the Local Health Integration Networks was evident from the start: they were given responsibility to better integrate our health system, but couldn’t address key parts of that system.

How do you integrate health care without the ability to better coordinate primary care? Physicians have always remained outside of system planning, and it could be argued that much of our system is defined by the agreement between the Ontario Medical Association and the Ministry of Health. This is totally outside the LHINs.

Oddly, while Family Health Teams remain outside the LHINs, Community Health Centres are in.

OPSEU has argued for years that the health system would be more efficient and cost-effective if hospital medical labs also conducted community-based work. Funding for community-based volumes would allow hospitals to increase staffing in their labs, expand scope of testing, and assist in the purchase of new equipment. For community doctors, it would result in faster turnaround of medical laboratory testing and give local physicians a direct lab contact in the community. In a comparison with some of the smallest hospital labs in the province, consultants RPO discovered that these labs were performing the same testing at two-thirds the cost of private labs. Once the hospital loses community-based work (there are only a handful left that still perform community-based testing) it is totally out of the jurisdiction of the LHINs. The North Simcoe Muskoka LHIN washed its hands of this issue when we raised it at the time Bracebridge and Huntsville hospital labs were losing their community volumes.

In Owen Sound the hospital is attempting to divest speech language therapy for preschoolers to the health unit. Once it is gone, the LHIN will no longer be able to address that service given health units are out of its jurisdiction. Who will monitor outcomes once that service is transferred? What happens if it turns out the hospital was the better host for the service, or perhaps another community-based agency? Who hold the health unit to account?

Within the LHIN jurisdiction, integrations are often about moving services around rather than facilitating strong links between health providers.

Integration shouldn’t just be about moving services from provider A to provider B and C.

As the Central East LHIN recently recognized, two addictions services don’t need to merge in order to cooperate on strategic goal setting. While it has been orthodoxy to move services out of hospital, the LHIN recognized the role of Lakeridge Health in maintaining one of these two addiction services.

The LHINs have consistently drawn a line between hospitals and community-based agencies, but hospitals do exist within communities. If a hospital is to provide community-based services, would it not by its very nature integrate well with other in-hospital services?

What role does prevention play? Not only is health promotion outside the jurisdiction of the LHINs, it is completely outside the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care.

We know, for example, that a more active population would dramatically reduce diabetes costs. One estimate suggests that if we were to bring diabetes down to the same level of northern European countries Canada could save $6 billion a year in health costs.

It’s true the LHINs do have contact with health providers outside their jurisdiction. But it has no ability to evaluate the quality of the work done by these providers, or whether the services they provide might be better delivered somewhere else. Nor does a friendly contact necessarily compel these providers to work more closely with hospitals, mental health agencies, home care or long term care homes.

The idea behind the LHINs was to make our health system just that – a system.

Some say five years is not long enough to get the job done. But what significant changes have the LHINs really made to date?

How long will it take to see a system emerge from the disparate entities that presently deliver public healthcare?

Are we expecting too much from bodies appointed to manage when what we really need are signs of bold leadership? Is this even possible within a LHIN model?

And where does the accountability lie? At present everything leads to the Minister of Health. Should it not also lead back to the communities?

Everybody has a shopping list of how we could do better. While our system is in the middle of the pack with regards to cost, there is no question that we could do better from an organizational point of view.

Our LHIN discussion series continues.

2 Comments

Posted in Local Health Integration Networks

Tagged , , , , ,

The trouble with LHINs

Posted on May 10, 2011 | 2 comments

Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) have become lightning rods in many communities.

The Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant LHIN was the focus of a scathing Ontario Ombudsman report “The LHIN Spin” which suggested public engagement was no more than lip service.

The South East LHIN recently sent their local communities into a panic after it floated the idea of concentrating all surgeries in Kingston.

The Erie St. Clair LHIN generated headlines last year when it unveiled plans to bring in a Disney speaker at a cost of close to $10,000. The speaking engagement was cancelled, although not the cost.

Aside from a horrible name, the LHINs have made many blunders to turn Ontarians against them – at least among the citizens that are even aware they exist.

68 per cent of PC supporters oppose plan to kill the LHINs

In a February 2011 Vector Poll, only 22 per cent of respondents claim to have either heard or read something about LHINs. Vector has been polling this question since 2006 with barely a change in results. After a brief description of what the LHINs do, 77 per cent of Ontarians opposed shutting them down. More troublesome to PC leader Tim Hudak, 68 per cent of PC voters are opposed to his promise to kill the LHINs.

It’s like that old song, “I can’t live with you, but I can’t get along without you.”

If the LHINs are likely here to stay, how do we fix them?

For starters, it’s about time the province come up with its overall strategic plan. It was supposed to be the guide for the LHINs to develop their own regional integrated health service plans. Instead, the province has been flighty in its priorities, often changing from Minister to Minister. George Smitherman was all about aging at home. David Caplan was about mental health. Deb Matthews is focused on getting alternate level of care patients out of hospitals.

Secondly, the LHINs are likely too small and have too few professional staff to effectively carry out their work. They like to crow about how small their administrative costs are relative to funding they shell out to hospitals, long term care homes, home care and other health providers, but it may be unreasonable. The Ministry has added to the workload with additional performance indicators and a broadened scope of oversight, but it refuses to allow the LHINs to hire appropriate staff to get the job done.

This may have something to do with point three – the LHINs have been very focused on reigning in costs, mostly at hospitals. It would be political folly to add to the LHIN administration while front line health professionals are being cut. This was supposed to be an exercise about quality, but clearly the focus has been on cost. One hospital CEO showed up at a LHIN board meeting to discuss progress on his hospital’s improvement plan. Missing from his presentation was information about the hospital’s performance on the LHIN’s quality indicators. To their credit, Ontario hospitals are in a far better place financially today, but it may be at a cost in quality.

The LHINs were supposed to take their strength from the communities they served, but no community has really warmed up to them. A few years ago OPSEU was invited to participate in a panel discussion on the LHINs by the Rural Ontario Municipal Association (ROMA). When the floor opened for questions, Mayors and Councillors of small towns lined up at the microphone to vent their frustration with the LHINs. The mayors felt the LHINs were unaccountable and were carrying out a hatchet operation on their local hospitals.

When a matter of concern comes up on the LHIN board’s agenda, often communities show up in considerable numbers. The LHINs lack any mechanism for representatives of these communities to address their concerns directly to the board. Recently two LHINs opened up their board meetings to deputations, although the process at Central East may be far too onerous and controlling to ever work.

When the LHINs did hold events for public consultation, these events often involved round tables with facilitators and set question lists. Many who have attended these events found the process manipulative.

When OPSEU took the Central East LHIN before judicial review in 2008, the lawyers for the government argued the LHINs were only responsible for high-level consultation, not on specific changes. In other words, the LHINs could ask what kind of health services a community might want, not on whether 20 mental health beds should be shut down at their local hospital and moved to another community.

It’s these specific initiatives when the public is most engaged, and it is these moments when the LHIN shuts them out of the process.

There are signs the LHINs are beginning to learn from their mistakes. At a recent Central East LHIN meeting they said they looked at integration between two addiction services and realized that while cooperation between the two of them was encouraged, it didn’t make sense for them to merge. The LHIN also acknowledged that Lakeridge Health was a good place to host one of these two services – a radical departure from the LHIN’s early days when it seemed they couldn’t move services out of hospital fast enough nor convince enough providers to integrate. This is the same LHIN than asked hospitals to set aside 1 per cent of their budget to allocate to a community-based health provider while trying to maintain it was making evidence-based decision-making.

There is a value to have a process by which health care providers must justify changes in service delivery.

The Southwest LHIN recently put the breaks on a plan by Grey Bruce Health Services to jettison speech language therapy for preschoolers. The hospital made the announcement under a hope and a prayer that the Health Unit would be able to pick up the work. The LHIN has since written to the hospital asking them to submit a formal integration proposal. Such a proposal will require more than a hope and prayer in the transfer of a service — it will need a HR transition plan.

The South West also responded to complaints that the Regional Mental Health Centre in London and St. Thomas was cutting beds without providing appropriate alternate services in the community. The LHIN allocated another $2.9 million for community delivery of mental health as a result. It won’t be nearly enough, but at least there was evidence they are listening.

It is far more productive to start talking about what the LHINs or their replacement might look like rather than take an axe to it all as Tim Hudak proposes. Diablogue will write more on this in the weeks to come.

2 Comments

Posted in Local Health Integration Networks

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

What’s beyond the LHINs? Hudak says he’d replace them with nothing

Posted on May 9, 2011 | 1 comment

There is no question the Local Health Integration Networks have had their share of problems.

When they were first proposed in 2005, OPSEU warned that it would lead to a rationalization of health care services and shield the politicians from unpopular decisions. To a degree, both concerns have turned out to be true.

One of the few promises provincial Tory leader Tim Hudak has made is to scrap the LHINs. The Tories say it would save $250 million, however, that is the total cost of the LHINs since 2006, not the annual cost. At present the LHINs take about $70 million per year to administer. On a $47 billion health budget (about half of which is within the jurisdiction of the LHINs) that’s a very small percentage allocated for administration.

If Hudak were to scrap the LHINs, he would not even save the $70 million. The LHINs replaced seven regional Ministry offices and 16 District Health Councils which previously cost $48 million. With inflation, the costs would likely remain equivalent to the LHINs if Hudak were to turn the clock back.

But Hudak says he would not replace the LHINs, he would simply cut them. We’re not sure how that would work, and likely neither does Hudak.

Dismantling the LHINs would not be free, as we discovered in the transition from District Health Councils and Regional Offices to LHINs. Costs ranging from broken leases to severance costs would be borne by government. Then there is the cost of transitioning the work.

Hudak doesn’t say what existing infrastructure would absorb the LHIN work, from planning and accountability to public engagement and integration. Is he actually suggesting we don’t need these functions?

The recommendations of the Health Restructuring Commission once dominated Ontario’s health care policy-making. Those recommendations are now more than a decade old. The data by which they came to their conclusions is closer to two decades old. There is a need to gather new evidence and make sound decisions around the future of our health system.

If we are to move forward we really have two choices – reinvent the existing LHINs, or come up with a new structure altogether. Both have their pros and cons.

Unfortunately the McGuinty government never followed-through on the requirement in the Local Health System Integration Act to conduct a review of the LHINs after five years. That would be now.

Neither did McGuinty ever produce the provincial plan that was supposed to be the guiding direction for the LHINs. Instead the LHINs scramble to fulfill whatever priority whim is the flavour of the day at Queen’s Park. Nowhere was this clearer than in the province’s focus on alternate level of care.

While the LHINs were making plans to utilize their aging at home funding, the Ministry changed its mind and suggested that at least half that money be devoted to getting ALC patients out of hospital.

Regardless of who gets elected, it is likely the LHINs will look very different after the October provincial election.

1 Comment

Posted in Local Health Integration Networks

Tagged , , , ,

Ontario looks at hospital report cards — Citizen

Posted on May 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

How many stars does your hospital have? According to the Ottawa Citizen, the Ontario government is contemplating a public ranking system for hospitals.

Ironically, as government MPPs bought the OHA argument that access to quality information from hospital committees would amount to naming and shaming, the ranking system appears to do just that.

The system was tried briefly in the United Kingdom, but ran into numerous problems. The naming and blaming turned back on government as hospitals with low ratings complained of lack of funding. Low rated hospitals also tried to spend their way out of the low ratings, resulting in escalating deficits.

The Citizen reports considerable gaming of data took place in the UK, including making patients linger outside hospitals in ambulances to meet the target of a four hour wait for treatment.

In 2005 the UK government ended the star system in favour of a two-part report card on quality and resource utilization. Hospitals were given a rating on a continuum from excellent to weak.

Some claim that shining the light on hospital performance spurs them on to improvement.

At present Ontario hospitals are posting performance information on their web sites as part of the Excellent Care For All Act. However, this information is not always easy to find. For the average Ontarians, it may also be difficult to decipher what the score card actually means.

In the case of emergency department wait times, hospital funding is connected to performance, as is CEO remuneration.

By attaching hospital funding to the report card it does pose the risk of penalizing not just the hospital, but the community accessing that hospital. Given few communities have any opportunity to elect members of their hospital board, it seems incumbent on government to fix poor performing hospitals rather than create a gap in quality access between communities. We can probably guess which well-heeled communities would have high-performing hospitals, and which would lose funding under such a scenario.

A quality agenda is always welcome, but it should focus on improving the whole system, not on creating winners and losers.

Leave a comment

Posted in Health System, Hospitals

Tagged , , ,

Windsor hospital CEO uses OPS deal to attack hospital workers

Posted on May 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

What does a one per cent increase for the Ontario Public Service have to do with Windsor Regional Hospital? Answer: very little.

Yet this morning the hospital’s CEO made the front page of the Windsor Star attacking the agreement, which does not directly impact staff at the hospital.

It’s true that all wage settlements are subject to comparison at the bargaining table, and it is likely WRH CEO David Musyj will try and introduce the lowest comparators he can find. If the two sides cannot agree, an arbitrator will look at all the submitted comparators. That’s the nature of the process.

OPSEU does not shy away from negotiating the best contracts for its members. During a recession it’s not unusual to have the final years of a multi-year contract make up for lower increases in the early years.

Musyj says both the arbitration and negotiation process is broken. How so? This is the same CEO who claimed he couldn’t afford $3.6 million in salary increases while the hospital was receiving more than $10 million in new money and audited statements revealed he was actually sitting on a surplus. Better still, the spring budget revealed status quo for the hospitals, forestalling reductions in the rate of increase that had been forecast in the 2010 budget. That means Musyj will likely see that surplus increase.

Musyj says his office is expected to reduce expenses by 10 per cent, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he will be taking another cut in pay (the latest Sunshine list showed Musyj took a cut in pay to $254,847 in 2010 from $265,000 in 2009). The government has made it clear that it will not penalize hospitals that fail to do so. With a surplus, what is Musyj’s motivation for doing so?

The question comes down to this: we are now emerging out of the recession, why is it would-be politicians like Musyj still trying to reduce the standard of living of working people? As we have noted repeatedly, the same thing was never asked of profitable corporations who are seeing their taxes cut to record lows.

It’s already party time on Bay Street and Wall Street.

This morning the economy posted stronger than expected job numbers, suggesting Ontario is bouncing back from the recession. That means more revenue for the government, and by extension, its hospitals. Where’s the panic?

Musyj is playing politics at the expense of the morale of his staff. This is far from good leadership.

Leave a comment

Posted in Hospitals

Tagged , , ,

Lack of civility as opinions differ

Posted on May 6, 2011 | 3 comments

This week OHA CEO Tom Closson wrote to a number of groups opposing the recent “hospital secrecy law” (Schedule 15 of Bill 173) that will allow the Ontario Hospitals to shield specific quality information from the public.

Given Schedule 15 had alredy been amended — presumably to the OHA’s approval — it is questionable as to the purpose of Closson’s sudden enthusiasm for letter writing. The actual amendment passed at the legislature’s finance and economic affairs committee Thursday morning.

What is most surprising from Closson’s letter-writing is his accusations that public interest groups were attempting to “grossly mislead” the public about the meaning of the Bill. The letters, all posted the OHA’s website, manage to insult the community organizations in a way we haven’t quite seen before.

He says Cybil Sack (Impatient4Change) “took significant liberties with the facts…while also making derogatory comments about hospitals, their leaders, and the professionals who work in them.” He further writes “it is apparent from your note that you believe the people who work in hospitals spend their days devising new ways to stifle public debate.”

To many of the organizations – including the Ontario Health Coalition, the Registered Nurses Association and the Service Employees International Union, he says he is writing to “rebut the grossly inaccurate claims.” He finishes all the letters with “on an issue as important as Ontarians’ health and safety, the “facts optional” approach your organization has taken to date is simply irresponsible. Ontarians deserve better.”

If these submissions were full of factual errors and misleading commentary, one might understand. Closson’s rebuttals fail to point out much in the way of factual error, but instead revisits the OHA’s original argumentation around the need for the schedule and takes issue with some of the intervenor’s interpretation of the role of the Quality of Care Information Act.

To suggest on this basis that anybody is trying to “grossly mislead” is a bit much. It also calls into question the OHA’s attitude towards public engagement.

By any interpretation, the government has opened the door to hospital transparency, and closed it to a degree with this amendment to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy legislation. That’s a fact.

Closson is not the only one getting in on the act of incivility.

Georgina Thompson, Chair of the South East LHIN, recently told the media that prior to the LHIN’s recent Road Map plan, hospitals “talked to each other but they didn’t play together in the sandbox well.”

We could be wrong, but some hospitals may take umbrage to their characterization as children who got straightened out by the LHIN.

It’s been a long cold and wet spring. Here’s hoping that with a bit of better weather we can all go back to debating health care policy without this kind of nasty rancour.

Oh, and Tom – no need to reply.

3 Comments

Posted in Health System, Hospitals

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Hospital secrecy – changes to Budget Bill fail to protect public interest

Posted on May 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

The latest amendment to Ontario’s Budget Bill 173 fails to address concerns raised around a change to freedom of information legislation that will permit greater hospital secrecy.

Schedule 15 of Bill 173 enables a hospital CEO to shield from public scrutiny any information about quality of care produced for or by a hospital committee. More than a dozen groups appeared before the legislature’s Standing Committee on Financial and Economic Affairs in April asking the offending schedule be removed.

Instead the McGuinty government has amended the proposed Bill to exempt “information provided in confidence to, or records prepared with the expectation of confidentiality by, a hospital committee to assess or evaluate the quality of healthcare and directly related programs and services provided by a hospital, if the assessment or evaluation is for the purpose of improving that care and the programs and services.”

Ontario hospitals are the last in Canada to come under Freedom of Information legislation. After introducing a public sector accountability bill last fall that would open up hospitals to freedom of information requests beginning January 2012, the McGuinty government recently caved-in to a lobby by the Ontario Hospital Association, the Ontario Medical Association and a private insurance company to narrow what would be accessible.

“The government’s amendment allows hospital executives to make some documents secret by simply stamping ‘confidential’ on them or retroactively suggesting that the records were intended to be private,” says Cybele Sack of Impatient for Change, a patient advocacy group. “Our freedom of information laws are meant to increase transparency and this amendment undermines that spirit.”

The final act is expected to be passed by the majority Liberal government this Thursday (May 5).

Leave a comment

Posted in Health System, Hospitals

Tagged , , , , ,

LHINs grapple with data to make decisions

Posted on April 28, 2011 | 1 comment

What is sufficient data to make effective decisions about the health system? What is the quality of that data?

Two issues came up at Wednesday’s Central East LHIN board meeting to illustrate both questions.

The LHINs across Ontario are balking at a lengthy list of performance indicators from the province they claim are “too many and too detailed.” The CE LHIN says it would need additional staff to keep up with the data stream the province is asking for.

James Meloche, a Senior Director with the CE LHIN, said the list of indicators was not strategic, leading departing board member Ron Francis to suggest the LHIN should be asking the province what they are planning to do with the data generated by these indicators.

Three different bodies are presently generating lists of indicators without any coordination between them. The LHIN says Hospitals are “maxed out” by the requirement for an every increasing stream of data.

For all the data that is presently collected, the veracity of it came into question in an exchange between Meloche and CE LHIN board member Samantha Singh.

Singh had questioned CE Community Care Access Centre CEO Don Ford on the large number of children awaiting speech-language therapy in the LHIN. Ford confirmed that the wait list for speech language therapy was between two and three years.

Meloche chimed in that the LHIN had previously only had 70 people on the wait list for speech language therapy– including both children and adults. After a recent blitz, he said that list was now down to 10.

Singh was incredulous; saying one school she visited had eight children waiting for speech language therapy.

The LHIN board also had a lengthy discussion about delays in getting data. At the April meeting the board was just getting results from the third quarter of last year. Paul Barker, a senior director of the LHIN, said reporting periods were “all over the map.” The third quarter data showed two hospitals in deficit, whereas in fact he said only one – Peterborough – would finish the year in the red.

With delays in getting data, the board is sometimes left making decisions on information that is six months old.

1 Comment

Posted in Local Health Integration Networks

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,