It has been regularly commented on by health administrators that the Manitoulin Health Centre, the hospital that serves Island residents, with emergency room access and a host of other medical service receives little to no funding from the provincial Ministry of Health for capital projects—leaving small rural hospitals and their communities to fend for themselves when it comes to major health investments.
It is unfair to say they provide absolutely no funding for capital, since the province does provide 90 percent of approved construction costs, but when it comes to the costs for equipment, furniture, and fixtures, which can be a substantial financial burden, hospitals are expected to foot 100 percent of the tab. This requirement is often met through hospital fundraising campaigns, municipal contributions and other hospital revenues.
A most recent egregious example is the government’s mandate to move to sharable electronic record systems, something that will have immense benefits to patients and their families. In the case of the Manitoulin Health Centre, that program ran to the millions of dollars in costs, yet, despite being mandated by the province, the hospital was forced to take out a loan to cover the costs.
Those loan costs, interest and principle, must come from the monies that could otherwise be utilized in improving patient care. If you build it they will come, but don’t expect the Ministry of Health to pay for it.
Another egregious shortcoming is the need for locum health professionals, caused primarily by the lack of available seats in medical schools that are controlled by the government. By limiting the number of doctors being produced, governments of all stripes and partisan flavours who have been in power in this province have kept the cost of health services envelop down—but at dire cost to those tens, if not hundreds, of thousands in this province who still do not have a family doctor.
The province’s answer has been to implement temporary fixes that pit hospitals against each other in attempting to attract health professionals to their fold. What is lacking is a long-term solution that has so far eluded both Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments.
Premier Doug Ford famously promised to end hallway medicine during his first election campaign, but that promise, along with dollar a beer, has yet to be fulfilled, unless one counts the closures of rural hospital emergency rooms. Of course, beer is now available in corner stores and gas stations across the province, although the most successful recycling program in the province may well be a casualty going forward.
But we digress.
It is long past time that provincial governments, of any and all stripes, step up to the plate when it comes to opening up more spaces to train doctors in this province. For too long governments have lauded minute increases in the number of those spaces, sometimes allocating spaces to new intuitions that will not be in full swing for a decade or more, yet spinning the announcements to make it seem more immediate.
A cynic might suggest that the government is taking a long view on the crisis, noting that the current Baby Boom generation who require ever increasing amounts of health care will soon be passing away and taking their pressure off the system. Certainly, limiting access to health care in the interim can help to speed up that particular solution.
The current health care crisis did not happen overnight, and it most definitely did not happen under just one party’s watch so there is a pox on all political houses when it comes to health care in this country.
But it is the current government’s responsibility to start taking a more proactive approach to solving the problems.
It’s well past time to “get ‘er done”— and by that we mean really, no spin, no short populous clips, but real action to provide real solutions.
