FORT FRANCES — Fort Frances Mayor Andrew Hallikas believes last week's Rural Ontario Municipal Conference was a success, despite not having the chance to sit down face-to-face with the heatlh minister.
Hallikas’ meeting with Health Minister Sylvia Jones was the only delegation the Fort Frances mayor had scheduled, which he planned to use to give a presentation on staffing shortages at the La Verendrye Hospital.
“It was a good delegation. We were a little disappointed because we were scheduled to meet the health minister herself, but we got the parliamentary assistant (MPP Robin Martin), not that I am knocking the parliamentary assistant, but we would have liked to have spoken to the minister,” Hallikas said.
Municipal leaders were not provided with a reason as to why Jones was not able to attend.
"It was a little bit of a letdown for us. You go in expecting the minister,” Hallikas said, while also acknowledging that Martin was very competent and knowledgeable.
Hallikas said he still feels like the community's concerns were heard by the Ministry of Health.
"We were doing a presentation on doctor recruitment and retention and then the fact that we felt that the health care system in the Rainy River district was getting close to a crisis point," he said. "We had a lot of information we wanted to get on the record and get across to them.”
Hallikas said Martin asked questions during the presentation to make suggestions on the different types of programs the Ministry of Health has implemented.
“She made some suggestions. The government has a program — telemedicine — where people can call in and that’s to keep them from going to emergency rooms,” said Hallikas.
Provincial officials also spoke about the recently announced expansion to the Learn and Stay Grant program the government is providing to post-secondary students for nursing, paramedic, and medical laboratory technologist programs. The Seven Generations Educational Institute and Confederation College are among the eligible providers.
Hallikas said that he is quite enthusiastic about seeing this program come to Fort Frances and he acknowledges that the program is going to address another huge shortage plaguing the EMS and nursing part of the healthcare sector in the North.
However, he said these programs do not address the compounding issues of physician shortages in hospitals. Hallikas said that a physician in Emo has left their position and two physicians in Rainy River are about to leave as well.
“Their workload is just not sustainable and they don’t have a good work-life balance. And then that compounds itself because our paramedic and ambulance schedule is all out of wack because you can’t take people to Rainy River or Emo to stabilize them. Everyone has to come to emerge in Fort Frances,” Hallikas said.
Hallikas is confident that the Ministry of Health programming is a great step forward in addressing the healthcare crisis in the north, but more can be done.
“She would offer suggestions which are appreciated, but we were familiar with most of them. What we needed was, like all places, solutions, assistants, financial assistants, and the government to do things to attract medical professionals to the North,” Hallikas said.
Hallikas would like to see the Ontario government work with the federal government in extraditing immigrants with medical training to the region.
“There are many trained medical professionals in Ontario who can’t practice because there are no spaces for them to do their residency to get their licence in Ontario. So, something the government could do, I think is relatively cheap, is to somehow expedite the way for already trained foreign doctors to practice in the North and help alleviate this shortage,” Hallikas said.
