Feature Article April 16, 2003
LAND O' LAKES NewsWeb HomeMore of that good old Harris legacy
Eight years after Mike Harris took over as Premier and promised to transform Ontario, another aspect of that transformation has taken place in our region with the cessation of service by the VON.
The explanation of how this took place that was given by the bureaucrat in charge of the system is quite telling. Alen Prowse said it would be unethical for the Community Care Access Centre to renegotiate a contract that was bankrupting the Kingston VON. Unethical is a loaded term, and to implicitly charge an organization like the VON with being unethical is outrageous.
What VON Kingston seems to have been guilty of is not negotiating well. In their desire to maintain the service they have been providing for 106 years, they made a bad deal for themselves with the government. The VON is known as a provider of crucial service, a service which allows people to stay out of hospital, to the benefit of the patients and their families, ultimately providing a cost savings to the overall health care budget as well.
VON service allows people to die at home with dignity, rather than in a hospital room. VON nurses are members of the communities they serve. One of them told me she is now treating people who watched her grow up, whom shes known all her life. How do you calculate the social benefit of that sort of circumstance into the ethics of contractual legalities that obsess people like Alen Prowse.
Mr. Prowse said there will be no impact to individuals with these changes. The nurses will still be there. But in his own satellite office a worker mentioned a situation that came about recently. The office was informed at around 4 p.m. that a patient had been discharged from an Ottawa hospital and was on their way home to Denbigh. They would need an IV drip at 10 that night. The VON in Northbrook took care of it. The worker wondered what would happen if she had to phone Kingston and arrange for a nurse to come for a 2 hour drive with only six hours notice.
Mr. Prowse admitted that Paramed and All-Care are not required to serve the rural area, and said he may have to seek out new contractors. But who will he find that will do the job at a loss? Will he end up paying more for nursing service than he would have paid had he reopened the VON contract.
Before a patient is released from hospital, a care manager must ensure home nursing is available to them if required. If nursing is not available, they must stay longer in hospital. Until now there has never been a question in the areas served by the VON. This may have already changed, and the social and economic cost of keeping people longer in hospital will be borne by all of us. The net effect could easily be increased costs to the health care system and a worsening of the quality of life for rural patients.
Dawn Peterkin of the Northbrook VON office said she hoped that people would make their views well known on this threat to rural health care services.
We would also like to hear what people think. We would especially like to hear about the home nursing service that will be provided to people in the coming months.
Have we entered an era where the ethics of contracts overrides the rights of patients to health care services?
