KENORA – For years, the health care sector has been in a constant state of fear as regional hospitals surfer month after month to maintain physicians for more than a few weeks at a time.
The looming threat of department closures has been talked about from municipal council meetings to the parliament in Queen’s Park with only minimal headway into solving the problem.
“The Lake of the Woods District Hospital has been working diligently to seek physician coverage to avoid any closures, but there is a strong chance that due to circumstances beyond our control, closures are imminent throughout the summer months,” Charlene Kissick, Brand Management Lead said the media release.
Lake of the Woods District Hospital is now facing the same dilemma of emergency department closures are imminent as they struggle to fill two-thirds of the emergency room shifts for July. In Aug., Racette explained that at the moment there are 40 uncovered shifts.
Ray Racette, CEO of Lake of the Woods District Hospital said, “We are facing the biggest shortage we’ve ever faced.”
With the threat looming, Lake of the Woods District Hospital advised that they have made a contingency plan put into place if the emergency department closes stating, “a patient who requires emergency care will be transported to the nearest Emergency Department.”
Unfortunately, the closest emergency department is 139 kilometres east in Dryden, 208 kilometres west in Winnipeg, Manitoba, 216 kilometres south in Fort Frances, and 270 kilometres north in Red Lake.
For those patients who will be redirected, Orange and EMS services will be available to take the drive.
However, all hospitals in the region are facing similar fear of closure due to a lack of available physicians.
“There isn’t enough stable emergency department in the region,” acknowledged Racette.
Red Lake’s Margaret Cochenour Memorial Hospital nearly adverted a 12-hour closure with a locum doctor coming through at the eleventh hour to keep the emergency department open; however, the crisis is averted temporarily. More closure is to be expected in the coming weeks.
Racette also explained that one of the pitfalls of getting locum doctors from out of the province to come to Kenora is licencing and competitive compensation. Locum physicians from Manitoba are paid substantially more than Ontario physicians, which doesn’t incentivize out-of-province physicians to take on an already full workload.
For those out-of-province physicians who are willing to work in Ontario, the barrier they face is obtaining a licence to practice medicine in Ontario, which they must get from The Ontario College of Physicians.
However, getting the proper licence to practice in the province is a lengthy process and the need for these physicians is immediate.
Since February, regional hospitals have joined together to collaborate resources to mitigate the foreseeable strain on their departments. Every time regional hospitals are on the verge of departmental closures; they submit a report to the Minister of Health.
“We started talking about this in February,” Racette said. “We’ve talked about licencing and being competitive with Manitoba.”
So far, these conversations with the province have gone nowhere.
Now that Ontario is in its seventh wave of COVID-19, the biggest fear is the strain the virus will put on hospital staff. If one person contracts COVID-19, that will be one less person to cover a shift.
