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This is the way I see it.

Brought up in the States and trained at Arlington County Community Hospital
in the 60's, I have to say Ontario's health program was excellent until the
early 70's when psychiatric patients were turned out of the institutions as
the place was 'in the community (i.e., for many, to become street people
who could not access welfare as they had no address for the cheques to come
to).

Then they 'revamped' nursing in the late 70's so that the nursing system
and dependency on agency nurses became a nightmare.

By the late 80's, the Province decided it would reallocate funding to
preventive medicine, so the Toronto Hospital Corporation gained steam.
Headed up by Dr. Arnold Aberman, the plan was to accumulate the teaching
hospitals in Toronto under one umbrella, and close down those which were
unnecessary. By the early 90's, bed were closed, and patients recuperating
from open-heart surgery were being sent home in three days. Even in the
Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto where I worked, one had to
have 'pull' to get a husband to stay longer. St. Michael's was seeing
re-admissions on many cardiac patients. I found it very difficult to spend
time on an acute-care ward as a pastoral visitor because of the terrible
lack of organization of agency nurses who did not know the patients or each
other, and the patients were asking me for help. It was a horrific
experience for me, who loved working at hospitals once upon a time.

In Alberta now, people are literally dying because of hospital closures in
small communities, and the lack of funds to sue for damages made by
hospital administrations who do not communicate the needs of the patient
nor apply for ambulance transportation. Diabetics go without the training
to tend to their needs as public-health nurse's programs to do so are
cancelled, rescheduled, and cancelled again.

The answer to Alberta's problems, however, may lie in L'Hotel's proposal to
run and fully staff these community hospitals, built on Lotto profits, on
the condition that organ donations will be by quota to Albertans, and the
rest for the patients L'Hotel brings in (the fact that vital organs can
only be harvested from living donors is another problem not being openly
discussed by the medical community).

Back here in Toronto, a 19-year-old cancer patient, a friend of my
daughter's, had to wait six months between his diagnosis and his treatment.
There is absolutely no excuse for this situation, and it is deplorable. And
yes, people are being denied treatment by some physicians who want more
than what OHIP allows, as I helped a relative make his complaint to the
College of Physicians and Surgeons and have read all the lies (sorry -
there is no other word) between the physician and the committee, and the
spiel the College gives the public (there being no such complaints before
the College), which is completely at odds with what their PR spokesman had
to say (yes, all the time).

The good news is, our Arnie will at last be able to make more than the
$250,000 he receives every year as the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine (the
highest paid Member of the University of Toronto's community -- even
President Prichard)...now he and his cronies are in a better position to
enjoy the high salaries they have coveted from their esteemed colleges
south of the border (without addressing the problems suffered by the
American system). All they have to do is close world-reknown Women's
College Hospital (a thorn in Arnie's side for years now), and he can
approach Mike Harris about privatizing health in Ontario, since all the
teaching hospitals have been amalgomated and unified.

Oh, and what happened to the funds that would be transferred from curative
health to preventative health? Who knows? The first thing Arnie did as Dean
was to liquidate the three sectors (Basic Sciences, Clinical and
Institutional, and Community Health) and merge departments wherever he
could...no-one really knows where all that money actually went as the
cutbacks were made...but I am sure the College of Naturopathy could sure
use it!

Just my two cents.

Sylvia.

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