BY HEIDI ULRICHSEN
To paraphrase Mayor John Rodriguez, no one is driving the health-care bus in Greater Sudbury.
After meeting with hospital, home-care and provincial health officials Wednesday afternoon, Rodriguez said he’s realized nobody is taking responsibility for health care in the city.
“One of the distinct impressions I had was there’s no overall planning,” he told reporters at a media briefing.
“Everybody is in their silo. Nobody seems to take responsibility for looking at health care overall.”
The newly-elected mayor said he wants to bring people together and he will become an advocate for better health care in the city once he understands all the issues. He also wants to meet with local physicians in the near future.
Rodriguez said the solution to the city’s bed shortage is to ask the province for more money to build long-term care facilities and bolster home care.
Sudbury Regional Hospital cancelled 20 elective surgeries this month because there were no beds for recovery.
Currently, 92 beds in the facility are being occupied by alternative level of care (ALC) patients waiting to be placed in nursing homes or convalescent care.
The province recently promised Greater Sudbury will receive 96 more nursing home beds to ease the city’s bed shortage. However, the beds will only be in place by the end of this decade.
The government also gave Greater Sudbury $884,020 to ease the pressure on the city’s health-care resources: $714,520 will be allocated to community-based care and $169,500 will go to the hospital for emergency room improvement.
But that’s not good enough for Rodriguez.
“Obviously, already, that’s not enough (beds), and those beds aren’t coming for awhile. We’ve got 56 people waiting... and that list is building every week,” he said.
“That’s not going to deal with our immediate problem. Those beds may not come until 2010/11, and who knows? There’s an election in 2007. We may have a whole new government, and what happens then?”
Health care is a municipal concern because doctors who are thinking of re-locating to the city might change their mind because of the bed shortage and surgery cancellations, he said.
This meeting is not related to his plan to set up a blue-ribbon committee to look into how health-care research jobs can be created in the city. This committee will be set up within 100 days of his inauguration as mayor, he said.
Sudbury Regional Hospital CEO Vickie Kaminski said she’s glad Rodriguez has shown an interest in health-care problems.
“I think the more voices there are, the better it sounds (to the province). If a community is on the same page, then there’s no reason the province wouldn’t listen. I don’t know that the mayor has a better, but he has a credible voice.”
She agrees with Rodriguez more money for home care is needed. Perhaps if people are cared for in their homes, they won’t have to go into long-term care facilities, she said.
Kaminski said it’s unfortunate the hospital is having to cancel elective surgeries again. However, it would be worse if the surgeries went ahead and the patients weren’t given appropriate post-operative care.
This is not the first time elective surgeries have been cancelled.
“We’ve had peaks where it has been this bad for short periods of time, and not always because of the ALC problem,” she said.
“Sometimes in the past we’ve cancelled surgeries because we didn’t have enough nurses or intensive care unit beds. I can remember in the old days we cancelled surgeries because we didn’t have enough equipment like ventilators.
“It takes the system a bit of time to re-adjust itself and come up with solutions to that problem, and then we equalize for a bit, and then there’s a new surge that we’re not ready for.”
