A Brighter Future For Public Health In Frontenac County?

Jeff Green | Mar 27, 2024

There was a lot of enthusiasm among the three people who presented a plan to create a single Public Health Unit to serve six counties and the City of Kingston. It is a plan that seems destined to become a reality, in a matter of months.

While all of the information and insight offered by Dr. Oglaza, Wes Garrod and Nathan Townend appears to be sound, there are a few uncomfortable realities that would make a sceptic wonder if the future of public health services in rural areas, such as Frontenac County, Addington Highlands, Tay Valley and Lanark Highlands, is about to be enhanced.

That is because in the very recent past, the service has been diminished and is slated to be further diminished.

For example, Dr. Oglaza talked about enhanced service to the Sharbot Lake area because of improved resourcing along the Highway 7 corridor, but only six months ago Kingston Frontenac Public Health, which he heads, closed its own office in Sharbot Lake. There is nothing to indicate that, under a larger Public Health Unit, that office will come back.

There remains an office in Cloyne, and while KFLAPH said they would not be closing that office when they announced the closure of the Sharbot Lake office, will it survive the inevitable service review that will take place? No one can say.

When the Sharbot Lake Public Health Office closed, one service gap was of such local concern that an arrangement was quickly made between KFLAPH and Central Frontenac Township. The township took over receiving and shipping water samples to the public health lab in Kingston. That lab is not operated by KFLAPH, but by a stand alone provincial agency, Public Health Ontario.

And that water testing service, which is as essential a public health matter as there is, in rural Ontario, is about to be phased out.

While this is not something that the Public Health Units that are planning to join forces can do anything to prevent, aside from voicing their concerns to the province, as Dr. Oglaza has done, but the measure demonstrates that there is no reason to trust the provincial government when it comes to rural public health services.

And it is the provincial government, not the new Public Health Unit's Board of Directors, that will dictate what kinds of services will be delivered by Public Health and how those services will be funded.

This is a well-worn path that rural Ontario has walked with the province. Creating larger entities, be they municipalities, hospitals, or Health Units, has been more about ensuring more centralised control over what kinds of services will be funded and how that funding is divided up, than about improving service.

The track record in healthcare for both the current government and the previous government has been poor. We lurch from crisis to crisis, from long wait times for surgery to a shortage in family health care and inadequate long term care, and there is no reason for anyone to be confident that the future will be better than the past.

So it is with the idea that a larger Public Health Unit will be more responsive to rural concerns. There are certainly grounds for scepticism.