THUNDER BAY - With the provincial election less than three months away, the leader of the opposition at Queen’s Park was once again in Thunder Bay this week, advocating for shorter wait times in northern health care settings.
“Here in Thunder Bay, there is a significant shortage of health care professionals and all across Northern Ontario people wait a long time to get the services they need, they wait too long and travel too far,” said Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath during a media conference at the Lakehead Nurse Practitioner Led Clinic.
Joined by Pam Delgaty, executive director of the Lakehead Nurse Practitioner Led Clinic, and Rob Moquin, a paramedic and unit chair for Local 3911, Horwath outlined some of the issues affecting equitable access to care throughout the region.
Horwath cited ambulances waiting hours at the hospital to offload patients, resulting in several code black situations where an ambulance was not available in the city, which Moquin says is a province-wide issue.
“Being a paramedic in the city of Thunder Bay, we have the distinction of being one of the busiest ambulance services in the province of Ontario,” Moquin said. “We have an increase in call volume of about eight per cent annually. We have an aging population, we have socio-economic issues, the opioid crisis, and certainly this pandemic.”
On Monday, the provincial government announced $3.6 million in funding for addictions and treatment services, which will allow St. Joseph Care Group and Dilico Anishinabek Family Care to add 34 new treatment beds.
“If we have more detox beds in the community, it’s going to lessen the impact on 911 calls that are bringing people to hospital for detox,” Moquin said. “It would have a huge impact and benefit the community greatly.”
Wait times at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre of more than 19 hours, 25 vacancies for full-time doctors at the hospital, and limited access to specialists are more examples Horwath used to argue the provincial government has been ignoring the north’s needs when it comes to health care.
“This crisis in access to equitable health care is not new,” she said. “It has gone on and on for decades and decades and has gone on as governments have cut funding for health care and ignored the needs of northerners when it comes to access to health care.”
According to Delgaty, the Lakehead Nurse Practitioner Led Clinic is sometimes the only way for people to access primary health care. It has recently received funding to add 1,600 more patients, but not every community has access to such care services.
“When people don’t have access to this they go to somewhere like the emergency and in doing so, it ties up resources and it’s preventing people who do need emergency services,” she said. “So we have to make sure this is something available to everybody in Ontario.”
Delgaty added that in order to provide these kinds of health care options all across Northern Ontario, more needs to be done to incentivise health care professionals to come to the region and stay.
According to Horwath, the NDP is putting together a plan to deal with shortages of health providers in Northern Ontario, including increasing the number of doctors coming out of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, new recruitment strategies, including ensuring there is adequate and affordable housing for health care professionals in remote communities, and fixing the Northern Health Travel Grant.
“Hopefully we wouldn’t need as many Northern Travel Grants to be issued because we would be providing the health care the people in the north need closer to home. That is first and foremost,” Horwath said.
Thunder Bay-Atikokan MPP Judith Monteith-Farrell added that the Northern Travel Grant should be similar to WSIB so patients are not forced to pay out of pocket for health care-related travel.
“The idea that it takes such a long time for people to get their money and shelling it out of their own pockets, we need to improve the scope of what is covered under the Northern Health Travel Grant, plus we need to facilitate a system identical to WSIB where people are not out of pocket, it’s provided for them, the travel they need,” she said.
The NDP will also be tabling a motion next week at Queen’s Park calling on the provincial government to implement a plan to attract and retain health care workers in Northern Ontario and repeal Bill 124 that limits wage increases for health care professionals, which Horwath said is pushing people out of the profession.
