P.O.O.C.H. needs your help

The dog needs more friends. It was movement born of frustration and anger. And the belief that the average person still has a say over how government and its institutions spend our money. A flickering optimism, naïve perhaps, that the community should have some input on the way health care is provided here.

For when this faint hope is at last extinguished, these services and institutions no longer belong to us. We will have lost them to the bureaucrats. As we’ve seen with eHealth, Ornge Air Ambulance, Ontario Power Authority and other public agencies, bureaucrats have a less than a sterling track record of managing our public assets when we aren’t watching them like a hawk.

After a decade of successive cuts to services and resources to the Picton hospital, Dave Gray had had enough. His hospital was going in the wrong direction and risked being reduced to an outpost triage station— a spoke in BGH’s hub. Worse, Quinte Health Care clearly wasn’t listening.

When Prince Edward County Memorial Hospital was forced into amalgamation with QHC in 1998, 29.4 per cent of the population of the County was 55 or older. Our hospital had 42 beds and an array of services appropriate for our community.

Now nearly half is 55 or older (43 per cent in 2011) and our hospital is wasting away, starved of resources and services. QHC has hacked and whittled away at PECMH until it is scarcely recognizable as a hospital, with just 12 beds remaining. Many of the services and facilities that comprise a real hospital have been deployed elsewhere, mothballed or discarded.

Just when we need our hospital most, it is being  sysstematically robbed, pillaged and dismantled by marauding bureaucrats seemingly out of reach, out of touch and deaf to the cries from this community.

Gray and a handful of others decided to fight back. Four busloads of County folks trooped back and forth in front the Ontario Legislature for several hours this past spring. A delegation met with the health minister. Her officials said they would consider the request to detach PECMH from QHC. But a subsequent letter from the health minister said disentangling PECMH from QHC would not be considered for the being.

Now the question is: Will this community accept this answer? Will we quit the fight? Will we, as many do when faced with illness, conclude that living in the County is just too hard and too risky?

Will we signal our defeat by moving closer to the urban core, nearer the services, care and attention that once resided in our community? Must we all pack up and move to the city when we get old? Or have a baby?

A large group of folks vowed last week to carry on the fight in Picton. Buoyed by success in other political battles and the unusual level of public participation found in the County, many believe the only real choice available is to continue to push back until someone listens.

Many know instinctively the fads and trends bureaucrats solemnly pursue today will be discarded by the next generation. As much as centralization is the panacea to the ills of health care by the prevailing bureaucrats driving health care policy today—the next wave will confidently and most assuredly inform us that the cure for health care is to empower communities to develop, fund and administer the care they need. Better and more economic, they will say, that these decisions be made in the community rather than one-size-fits all solutions devised in office office in Toronto, by bureaucrats who have never been to Prince Edward County, Cornwall, Niagara or Sarnia.

In the meantime, we must do our best to preserve our hospital and the principles of health care close to home that unite us and for many, make it possible to live in Prince Edward County.

Dave Gray and a handful of others can’t do it on their own. They need the energy, talents and wisdom that reside here. Many stepped forward last week. Many more are needed. The best way to signal your willingness to help fight for your hospital is to contact Dave Gray, Wolf Braun, Leo Finnegan, Al Reimers or Betsy Sinclair. POOCH is online with a Facebook page. A more comprehensive online presence is coming.

We are not alone in this fight. The County is blessed with a great group of doctors and allied health care professionals. They work well together and offer a welcoming and supportive environment to prospective doctors and professionals. Many are leading the fight from within the walls of the system.

Will you help save our hospital? While we still have the semblance of a hospital to save.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca