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VON preparing to bow out

Feature Article April 22

Feature Article April 22

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VON preparing to bow out

Its now been over a month since the Community Care Access Centre (Kingston) announced that St. Elizabeths Health Care had received a contract to provide nursing care in Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington, along with All-Care and Paramed corporations, leaving the Victorian Order of Nurses (VON), who until recently had been synonymous with home nursing in the region, entirely out of home nursing.

St. Elizabeths Health Care is a long established not-for-profit corporation that had been a pioneer in home delivery of health care in the Toronto area, just as the VON has been throughout the rest of Ontario and Canada, but unlike the VON, St. Elizabeths has been consistently winning contracts for nursing from Community Care Access Centres throughout the province.

At the time the contract was awarded to St. Elizabeths, VON management reportedly told a gathering of VON nurses that St. Elizabeths would take them on, but at least in the northern area, only the part-time members of the northern VON nursing corps have decided to sign on with St. Elizabeths. The two full time nurses, Cathy Fox, who works in the Parham to Plevna region, and Dawn Peterkin, who has served in the Addington Highlands - western North Frontenac region, have both decided not to seek employment with St. Elizabeths and will instead be leaving the home nursing field once the VON is no longer being referred patients.

Exactly when that will occur is not yet known. Janet Sirriani, a manager with St. Elizabeths, told the News they will be ready to receive referrals for nursing on May 3, but said the decision on when patients will be transferred to St. Elizabeths or one of the other two services will be made by the CCAC.

Meanwhile, many VON nurses have not yet received any notification about when they will be laid off.

This is a problem because we dont know what to tell our patients, who want to know if we will be coming next week, or the week after, and we dont know what to tell them, nurse Cathy Fox said.

St. Elizabeths has confirmed that they will not be opening a rural satellite office in the near future, and will be running their entire operation from a base in Kingston, as does All-Care and Paramed.

In other locations, we do have satellite offices in rural areas, but we will have to wait and see where the referrals we receive from the CCAC are located before considering opening a satellite office. For now, we are setting up an administrative office in Kingston. Thats enough for us at this point, Janet Sirriani said.

Dawn Peterkin, who has been receiving most of the referrals in the region in the farthest reaches of Frontenac and Lennox and Addington, including Denbigh, which is more than two hours away from Kingston, said she has not been contacted by St. Elizabeths, either to see if she was interested in working for them, or to get her to show them the territory where she has been working for the past 4 years.

No one from St. Elizabeths, as far as I know, has driven the territory to see what it is like, what the people are like, what the roads are like, Dawn Peterkin said.

Peterkin declined to attend any of the job fairs organized by St. Elizabeths, and said she will be looking for a full time position in the city whenever she receives her layoff notice from the VON.

Cathy Fox attended a job fair, and had several conversations with St. Elizabeths representatives before deciding not to seek employment with them. Both Fox and Peterkin said they were not considering leaving homecare nursing until the VON ran into financial trouble a year ago.

As rural nurses, the VON crews out of Sharbot Lake have performed many tasks that are done by specialist nurses in larger centres, including dialysis and palliative nursing.

The News was unable to contact the CCAC transition manager to find out when the nursing service transition will take place. We will attempt to get that information by next week.

(The News is planning a special article on the VON and their years of serving our communities. If any of our readers have any special memories of the VON, please send them to us)

With the participation of the Government of Canada