KENORA – The weight of the pandemic is still propped on the shoulders of Northwestern Ontario’s health care services like excess baggage on a sinking cargo ship. Hospital staff is doing what they can to fill the holes while the provincial captain shouts, “full steam ahead!”
The Kenora District Service Board has been doing what it can to ensure emergency mobile services are available for the public. However, with an influx of service calls reaching beyond their volume capacity, KDSB is concerned about what means for the district.
When looking at the serviceable EMS area for the KDSB, hospitals in the region are hours apart, which would mean, those needed severe emergency care might not make it to an emergency room if their local hospital is forced to close its doors.
“If Kenora, if Lake of the Woods (District Hospital) were to close what that would do to not just our 9-1-1 system but also Air Orange as well, whether that’s Rainy River or Thunder Bay,” said Henry Wall, CAO of KDSB. “And the numbers that we ran, should Lake of the Woods ever be in a position where the emergency department was to close, it would paralyze the 9-1-1 system for much of our entire district because of increase of call volume we have seen over the last couple of years.”
Wall also explains, “When we look at our overall call volume across the district, it has been steadily increasing over the last five, six years. We are not talking just by a little bit. We are talking double-digit percentage-wise year over year. Especially when you look at, just pre-pandemic what our call volume was like, and then we looked at just post-pandemic, we are not out of it yet. But just looking at the call volume alone, we are starting to see some very concerning trends. Both in terms of the amount our call volume has gone up, the number of 9-1-1 calls being placed, the types of calls being placed, and also for the demographics as well.”
The pressure of meeting the demand for EMS service extends to the Lake of the Woods emergency department. The influx of patients needing medical services put a vast amount of pressure on hospitals that have a duty to help the public, but can’t due to the lack of health care providers.
According to Wall, between 2020 and 2021, the call volume for EMS service in the Kenora District rose about 18 per cent. Much of the percentage consists of young people.
“What has us concerned is we really look at the demographics, especially during the pandemic,” Wall explains. “Biggest growth, like percentage wise, 0–10-year-old children. We saw a huge increase. It was 36 per cent. The other is 31-40-year-olds with a 39 per cent increase.”
Wall rhetorically asks why do parent-age adults and young children need a vast amount of health care services. Although Wall did directly answer his question, he does point out how concerning these demographics are to the healthcare system as a whole.
“So, we have that occurring at the same time our hospital partners are really struggling to staff their emergency departments and I can tell you that if we have a situation where the emergency departments were to close, you know we went through that in Red Lake and it demonstrated to us that the EMS system does not have the resources to be able to handle the additional pressures being put on us to get patients to the next hospital,” said Wall.
Wall hopes that Ontario’s leaders are considering the seriousness of the demand for health services and the staff shortages plaguing the healthcare sector in the north.
“As leaders are looking at what to do moving forward, what we really need to be looking at is why are emergency departments as busy as they are?” Wall asks. “Like what is happening in the community and perhaps more community supports need to be had in the community versus relying on EMS and emergency departments to be it for people.”
With the municipal elections beginning soon, it is hard to say at this time what the municipal government can do to install more community-related health services as an alternative to going into the hospital. The problem with relying on municipal councils to solve this problem is municipalities do not have the resources to fund community-driven programs alone.
Recently, the Federal government has announced that they will be tripling their recruitment and retention allowances through to 2025 for Indigenous Services Canada nurses in remote and isolated communities.
Hopefully, this allowance will get people motivated to enter the health care sector and fill the vacant void within many of these important services. However, this funding only goes to a specific group of preceptive nurses and PSW to work in the field, which only puts a band-aid on a much larger issue.
The provincial government, which is in charge of ensuring Ontario’s healthcare system is stable, is determined to ignore the problem. Union groups are calling for the Ford government to repeal bill c-124.
The bill, which caps total compensation for tens of thousands of Ontario nurses and healthcare professionals at one per cent per year in each of three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, was passed by the Ford government at the end of 2019, just before the onset of the pandemic.
Now that the Ontario government has asked for the public to live with the virus so Ontario can reopen for business, essentially ending the pandemic restrictions and the need to supplement the cost of health care, Bill-124 remains in place.
Now with the Ford government hinting at plans to create a more privatized healthcare system, the reality of community-driven healthcare services getting funded by the Ontario government won’t happen. Instead, these types of services will be cost-based services which will alienate the lower-income public from using those services increasing the strain on emergency services.
