KENORA – There’s a promising plan to pull the local hospital’s ER from the brink of collapse, but provincial officials won’t sign off on it, All Nations Health Partners officials said Friday.
The health partnership includes Lake of the Woods District Hospital, the City of Kenora, Kenora Chiefs Advisory and other partners interested in patient-centred health care and construction of a new general hospital in Kenora.
They created a funding model for better recruitment and retention of doctors, All Nations co-chair Dr. Jillie Retson said Friday in an online media scrum.
“There’s widespread agreement that this is the solution that is going to work for our area,” said Retson, adding that local MPP Greg Rickford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones expressed support for it.
Yet “negotiations seem to be stalled” after a year of negotiating in good faith with the Ontario government, she said.
The Kenora partners and the province have agreed to virtually all of the plan, she said, except “the emergency piece” – a funding model for emergency care.
“We haven’t had a negotiating meeting (with the province) for two months despite now finding ourselves at a critical juncture,” Retson said.
“So, despite negotiating in good faith, now we’re at a critical juncture whereby there is real threat that the emergency room is going to close,” she said.
Retson described ER closure as a “disastrous” possibility.
An ER closure would “paralyze the medical system” quickly and mean “a really tragic outcome for the unfortunate person who needs the emergency department,” said Dr. Laurel Snyder, a member of the health partners’ clinical advisory committee.
The possibility of closing the emergency department “is the hardest conversation we have had to have amongst ourselves in leadership and in our community in the 25 years that I’ve worked here,” Snyder said.
So, she continued, “we are calling on the Minister of Health … to come out to Kenora, to come visit, to come sit with us to listen. We really need to move this plan forward.”
“There’s no hospital administrator that ever wants to consider closure of an emergency department,” said Cheryl O’Flaherty, chief executive officer of the Lake of the Woods District Hospital.
But it’s “important for the public to understand the crisis that we’re approaching and we are doing everything in our power to ensure that we don’t close,” she added.
ER closure, O’Flaherty said, “is the absolute last resort” but a distinct possibility given the current physician shortage in Kenora.
She said three-quarters of emergency’s physician shifts in September will be filled by locum doctors from outside the region.
That’s costly and “doesn't provide for a good continuity of care for those seeking care in our emergency department,” she explained.
The Ministry of Health had a representative in Friday’s media event, but he did not answer questions or offer any comment.
Hours later, the Ministry emailed Dougall Media a statement saying it "is aware of" the Kenora partners' proposals and has been working with them.
"The proposals are for physician services and as the Ontario Medical Association is the exclusive representative of physicians practising in Ontario, formal negotiations with the OMA began on this issue on July 4, 2024," the statement continued.
"We look forward to continued conversations and are hopeful an agreement with the OMA can be reached to connect people in Kenora to the services they need, when they need them."
Hospital officials said this week that a “critical shortage” of physicians has the emergency department on the brink of closure.
The hospital has gone from having 20 physicians who worked in emergency in early 2022 to just nine part-time ER docs today.
