Letters: February 18

Community group plans to buy Verona doctor’s clinic, Lynn Wilson

Community group plans to buy Verona doctor’s clinic

Congratulations to the Verona Community Association for its efforts to retain one of the services key to a viable, sustainable community. Its move to turn the Verona Medical Clinic into a turn-key operation, a major incentive for new physicians entering community practice shows major community planning foresight among other things. The Northbrook community has done the same with Dr. Tobia’s clinic.

The Verona Medical Clinic provides services to nearly 40 percent of the patients who now get their medical services locally in South Frontenac between it and the Sydenham practice. And the Verona practice continues to take new patients locally, including 43 since January who cannot find a physician.

The major point behind the drive to retain services in this community is local access. Many of those who live in Verona and work in Kingston have their physicians in Kingston. But the majority of Dr. Dempsey’s patients are those who live in a widely-dispersed geographic area way up the back roads for whom travel costs, the sheer physical barrier of distance, can be major issues. Travelling into Kingston is, in many cases, simply not an option. And there is nowhere else to go given that the practices in the Rural Kingston Family Health Organization are already so swollen.

Home Care (CCAC) services have just been cut back; VON services are almost impossible to get for these folks; the services of the SMILE program (a LHIN Aging-at-Home-related initiative) are exceedingly modest. As the blatant rationing in the health care system progresses, the importance of retaining existing local services becomes more critical.

For South Frontenac (and for Stone Mills in L&A where three of the RKFHO practices are located), it begs the question just what “underserviced” actually means nowadays. When the designation was achieved, that designation was based upon ratio of patient population to available clinical resources. Now it’s linked to the RIO scores. To demonstrate the kind of absurdity that this kind of gross tool can result in, Napanee has a higher RIO score than Verona!

In South Frontenac, the Sydenham practice is just as vulnerable to the pernicious influence of the RIO score reclassification and recruitment difficulties as are the Verona and Tamworth practices. The need to develop a turn-key operation at that clinic is just as important as it is for Verona and Tamworth. It needs a new facility. The general difficulty in recruiting to a rural practice, even one as relatively close to Kingston as Sydenham is, may be revealed in just the general difficulty of getting a locum to cover off an impending maternity leave. Three months’ coverage is all we have managed to achieve this far. We live in hope.

The County of Frontenac and its townships have an opportunity to take a systematic and coherent approach to developing a solid health and social services network. To this point in time, these have been left as discrete entities to tumble up in a system as best they could. Localism prevailed. It was enough to have them. Now we have to keep them. And with a well-developed and tended network, community sustainability has a real opportunity to develop.

As the Verona Medical Clinic moves into its future, it plans to develop expanded programs for its patient population and the patients of the Rural Kingston FHO. Dr. Dempsey is confident that “the right person” will come along to work with her in practice and in the recruitment of a third physician. And Dr. Dempsey and her future partners will have the Verona Community Association to thank for enabling continuity of service to its community.

By the way, Dr. Dempsey has no immediate plans to retire.

Lynn Wilson, Administrator,
Rural Kingston Family Health Organization

Re: Flubs and Retractions

It's refreshing to see a newspaper deal with mistakes on the front page, rather than tuck retractions, corrections, apologies, and such in the most obscure corner available.

It has been my opinion for some time that we should have a law requiring all retractions, apologies, lawsuits-against, and so on to be writ large on the front page with a suitable headline. It would raise the standard of journalism and would frequently provide entertaining reading -- all at no cost to taxpayers.

And as a logical extension, a "mea culpa" segment on prime-time TV could achieve record ratings.

Robert Thomas