FORT FRANCES — A network of community organizations across Ontario are using their platform to amplify the critical healthcare situations being faced by municipalities in the Rainy River District and call for action from the provincial government.
In a video press conference last Friday the Ontario Health Coalition, a network of approximately 400 grassroots community organizations joined with Rainy River Mayor Deb Ewald and local CUPE 4807 president and paramedic Malcolm Daley to bring wider attention to the shortage of doctors and paramedics being experienced in the region, specifically Rainy River and Emo.
Ontario Health Coalition executive director Natalie Mehra led the video press conference, calling what is happening in the district “very, very serious.”
“All of the physicians in Rainy River have announced that they are resigning,” Mehra explained.
“They're leaving, two of the three at the end of September, and the other will stay till November to provide some coverage, but that's it. So that's all of the physicians in town. They provide the services at the Rainy River clinic and at the hospital in that community... we're not trying to alarm the community unduly, but obviously this is a very, very serious threat to access to health care and people's health in Rainy River and the region around it.”
“In addition to that, they have announced the closure of the paramedic service from Emo because of a critical staffing shortage,” Mehra continued.
“At this point, the distances are really ominous. It's at least 50-plus kilometres from Rainy River to Emo. That service covers the whole region around Emo, and then from Rainy River to Fort Frances, which is the next hospital where people would have to go if the emerg department were to close in Rainy River, is more than an hour drive in good weather. It is alarming, the distance between Rainy River and any other service that people would need to access.”
Mehra noted that the province of Ontario has already announced it has extended funding for locums to help provide care at Rainy River hospital. Riverside Health Care, the organization responsible for managing the hospitals in the district, has also said the hospital will be covered through November through this funding. Mehra said this action from the government only pushes the problem back to the end of November, after which “there is no plan.”
A spokesman for the Ministry of Health said the ministry has been in constant contact with local health officials.
“Ontario Health and the Ministry of Health continue to work with the hospital on a plan to ensure Ontarians can access the care they need, when they need it. The hospital CEO and Ontario Health met to discuss short, medium, and long-term goals to ensure the emergency department remains open 24 hours. Based on these conversations, the hospital will be submitting a revised proposal in the coming weeks. The Ministry and Ontario Health are also working to establish a Working Group to address each phase of work," said Hannah Jensen, the director of communications for Health Minister Sylvia Jones, in a statement emailed to NWONewswatch.
Ewald echoed Mehra's statement of the situation being serious in the municipality, noting the town has found itself in a “very, very terrible situation,” and that, despite bringing her concerns to southern Ontario when she attended the Association of Ontario Municipalities (AMO) annual meeting in August, she hasn't seen much in terms of results.
"In the wintertime it can take up to three hours to go from Morson to Fort Frances hospital if the ambulance needs to take them there... It's just a terrible, terrible thing that's happened, and there needs to be some significant changes, because otherwise people are going to die. It's that dire," sad Ewald, who expected to meet with ministry officials shortly.
She added people in the community are now scared that in a situation they need emergency care, there will be none to be found.
“We have a very senior population in this community as well, and people are afraid,” she said.
Daley was the next to speak during the conference, and he noted that the area is suffering from a significant lack of paramedics, and that the impacts are now being felt throughout the district.
“We are just at the tail end of an ongoing struggle right now with staffing, and we've reached a crisis point,” he said.
“I've framed it in the past as, we're no longer treading water and we're starting to drown. Our paramedic service, to speak specifically to that, has had, at least multi-years now, very, very limited recruitment and retention strategies.
"No new paramedics are really joining the workforce, while existing paramedics are exiting, either to seek career opportunities in the same field elsewhere, or to leave the career altogether. In the region specifically... our access to health care has never really been lower, and I say that as a health care worker representative and a citizen, that the access is ever-decreasing.”
Daley said that staffing shortages in the district are the “primary and major pressing concerns,” which has led to the decision to temporarily relocate services from the Emo ambulance base to the bases in Rainy River and Fort Frances in order to sustain coverage for the region.
In a self-defeating reality, the increased hours local paramedics are currently working to sustain services are leading to more burnout and exits from the career in the region, exacerbating the problem.
“We have this situation where our current staffing levels and our infrastructure isn't designed to meet the needs of the community, and as a result, we're having further staffing crisis due to burnout,” Daley said.
“Our paramedics are putting in astronomical amounts of overtime, up to 50 per cent greater than full time work hours annually, and they're starting to fail and to falter. They're doing this to keep the services available, but our existing workforce is just not sufficient to maintain the services that our communities need.”
Where the northern parts of the province once used to rely on an overflow of paramedics from more southern regions in Ontario, that overflow has disappeared as more and more job openings were made in other parts of the province, where they are experiencing their own staffing shortages.
Also on Friday's call was Jules Tupker, the co-chair of the Thunder Bay Health Coalition. Tupker noted that even though his coalition primarily deals with the Thunder Bay area, they have heard more and more frequently from the more western parts of the province about the struggles facing health care in those areas. In Tupker's eyes, the buck stops with the provincial government.
“We've been getting more and more input from communities around northwestern Ontario, and we're looking at at the situation, and clearly the situation in Rainy River and Emo are two areas that we're very, very concerned about,” Tupker said.
“It's just unbelievable that the government is allowing this to happen... this is not just all of a sudden that happened last week or last month, the problems have been building up for quite a long time.
Mehra called on the province to step up and address the situation, charging them to provide solutions that are more than “band-aids” that only push the problems further down the road by providing temporary relief.
“This is a major problem,” she said.
"We need a real answer from the Ford government about what they're going to do to stabilize the services, because people's lives, their very lives, are at risk in this situation.”
Fort Frances Times / Local Journalism Initiative
