TORONTO -- The Ontario government is running headlong into yet another round of health care restructuring without consulting the public, front-line staff, health care providers or patients, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union warned today.
The provincial Cabinet has already approved Health Minister George Smitherman’s plan to divest responsibility and funding for health care from the Ministry of Health to Local Health Integration Networks (LHIN).
“Where’s the consultation?” asked OPSEU President Leah Casselman. “This smacks of the Harris Tory era, when big changes were introduced quickly in the summer and nobody had time to respond.”
Smitherman’s proposal would close health ministry operations and may affect the operations of Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP), home care and the future of the province’s psychiatric hospitals.
At an emergency meeting July 22, the OPSEU Executive Board approved a province-wide advertising campaign targeting the LHIN proposal, under the banner “Have you been consulted?” The union will also send a letter to Smitherman’s constituents.
“The crisis in health care is in the recruitment and retention of staff,” Casselman said. “After eight years of Tory restructuring, what we don’t need is another bureaucracy that eats up dollars and creates more chaos in the system.”
Casselman also pointed to the ongoing problems with Community Care Access Centres (CCAC), the home care system created by the previous Tory government. CCACs operate under “managed competition” and contract services from community agencies or for-profit companies. Services are disrupted when a contractor loses the contract, as happened
recently in Niagara, Ottawa and Kingston.
Despite these problems, Smitherman has refused to review the CCAC model.
“If the new LHINs operate like the CCACs, heaven help the people of Ontario,” Casselman said.
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For further information:
Paul Bilodeau, OPSEU Communications: 416/443-8888 Ext.780
