County urges province to pause health-care service cuts
BRUCE COUNTY - Two members of Bruce County council – the mayors of Saugeen Shores and South Bruce – are asking the province to take a more wholistic approach when it comes to health care in this area.
Deputy Warden Luke Charbonneau made the motion at the June 20 meeting, seconded by County Coun. Mark Goetz, asking the province to pause health care service cuts in this area, until the wider implications can be examined.
Charbonneau said the motion stems from a conversation he and Goetz had about the Durham hospital, (where all in-patient beds have been relocated to other hospitals in South Bruce Grey Health Centre).
He noted that while such impacts on health-care are happening, “we’re being asked as a region increasingly to support nationally significant projects, and more on the way all the time.” He said that’s exciting for our communities from an economic development standpoint but “it requires a broader analysis of services like health care, to ensure that while we’re trying to have those projects happening in our community, we can have the services here to support the people who are moving here to build those nuclear plants, build those deep geological repositories, make those isotopes and do all those other things.”
He summed up his views by saying, “We think it’s necessary for a broader analysis to be done before we start shutting down services and moving beds out of certain areas. We need to look at the whole impact, and say, what kind of health-care services do we need, to support these projects that everybody needs us to do, and then and only then, make some rational decisions about how health care should be deployed across our region.”
He went on to say that the fear is that what happened in Durham could happen in any community.
“We need that review to be done,” Charbonneau said. “It’s not only in our interest, but in the interest of Ontario and Canada that this region have the services necessary to support these major projects which will help us meet our climate change goals, help us meet our electricity goals.”
Goetz said that as a county councillor, “we often, and rightfully so, wear multiple hats here and look at the county as a whole when we make decisions.
“Perhaps we should be expecting the same from the upper tier governments when they’re making decisions,” he said, adding that county councillors are asked to work on some important issues, including housing. “Something like this (hospital service cuts) can have a huge impact on the goals we set at the county level, to work on the housing crisis that we face.”
Goetz said that in talking with West Grey Mayor Kevin Eccles, he’s learned that there’s a large subdivision at the north end of Durham. “That could help immensely with the (housing) situation that we’re dealing with here. But if you lose your hospital … I’m not sure you’re going to have a real attraction there, to attract people to your community.” Goetz noted that these are the people who’ll be working on the big projects in the wider community.
“I think that the message should be made quite clear to the upper levels of government that we’re all in this together,” said Goetz.
He added that our senior citizens deserve better. He said he wants to see them stay in our communities, and he wants to see “young families thrive in our communities. Health care plays an important role in that.”
Goetz commented that “I’d like to see a message to the upper levels (of government) that we need to work more closely together on this, because some of their decisions can strongly affect the decisions that we make on a day-to-day basis.”
The motion stated that the counties of Bruce, Grey and Huron, with a population of less than 250,000, are “supplying 30 per cent of Ontario’s electricity and contributing more than $4 billion annually to Ontario’s GDP.
“Our region is relied upon to contribute to the pressing electrification of Canadian society through major energy investments, including Bruce Power’s Major Component Replacement, and other large-scale initiatives under consideration such as 4800 megawatts in new nuclear electricity generation, a nuclear waste deep geological repository, a pumped storage facility, and a large-scale battery storage facility … a significant proportion of the world’s supply of medical isotopes (used to sterilize equipment and treat cancer) are produced by Bruce Power, in our region.”
At the same time, as stated in the motion, local health-care systems are “struggling with limited resources that impact service levels, emergency room closures, access to primary care, and the sustainability of our systems.”
The motion calls on the Ontario Ministry of Health to “implement an immediate pause on all planned and future service level reductions and closures at hospitals within the Bruce, Grey and Huron region … and that this this pause remain in effect until detailed studies can be undertaken to understand how we can safeguard our health-care system and broader social safety net, to ensure the success of our region while supporting nationally significant projects.”
Pauline Kerr, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Walkerton Herald Times
