Ontario health system ‘woefully inadequate' (in response to SARS) | G&M

[Ediacara]

Ontario health system ‘woefully inadequate'

By DARREN YOURK
Globe and Mail Update

An interim report into the SARS outbreak calls Ontario's public health system "woefully inadequate" and says the province was saved from further disaster by the heroic efforts of dedicated front line health care and public health workers.

"SARS showed Ontario's central public health system to be unprepared, fragmented, poorly led, uncoordinated, inadequately resourced, professionally impoverished, and generally incapable of discharging its mandate," the report, written by Mr. Justice Archie Campbell, says. "The SARS crisis exposed deep fault lines in the structure and capacity of Ontario's public health system."

The interim report outlines a system-wide lack of co-ordination and communication that, coupled with an absence of expertise and limited laboratory capacity, left the province extremely vulnerable to an outbreak that killed 44 people.

More at the Globe and Mail

[achtung_circus]

1. Thanks to Mike Harris

You might also check out the judicial review on the meat inspection fiasco.
I was warned in about 1998? by a meat inspector in Alberta (where I was living) to watch what happened in Ontario. She said, it won't be tomorrow or even necessarily next year, even, but cutting meat inspection to the bone (pun not intended) (really) will have consequences down the line.

And ask the people in Walkerton whether they'll mindlessly vote for tax cuts again.

<http://www.meatinspectionreview.ca/eng/>

[Canuckistanian]

2. Yes, its becoming clear that the system failed

I heard a story that they had some of the best epidemiologists from CDC in Atlanta during the crisis and they were just sitting around doing nothing because no information was being coordinated.
Thank you, Mike Harris.

[Lisa]

3. praise the "first responders" but cut back their resources ...

Throughout the Harris years, that was the pattern we saw ... the neo-cons didn't dare lash out directly at the health care workers, cops, public health inspectors, teachers (all those other powerful public service unions!) -- so they called them lazy, inefficient, bureaucracy-laden etc. behind their backs, and took away the funding they needed. There is a public health lab within sight of my parents' house that was abandoned during that time, for want of money. (We sure could have used that lab when SARS came to the region ... and even earlier, with an active TB scare a year or two before.) A school friend of mine who went to work as an administrator at the Ministry of Health was ordered to start closing hospitals, including the one where both of us had been born -- after enduring months of community meetings she suffered a stress reaction that made her so sick she had to leave her job.

Public health facilities and training programmes were gutted. Some of the nurses and doctors paid with their lives during the SARS crisis for such arrogant, selfish disregard. One of my mom's friends became horribly ill after ingesting half a glass of water when she stopped in Walkerton en route to her cottage -- a totally preventable situation which was allowed to happen because of deregulation. The boy next door(now in his twenties, so he's not "little" anymore) grew up to become a critical care nurse, and put in dawn-to-midnight shifts trying to fight the SARS epidemic -- his parents were terrified that he would be infected like those nurses in Toronto.

During those years we had an Education Minister who dropped out of high school and sneered at "intellectuals". Having a government that pretended the only reason people worked in the public sector was because they were too lazy or inept to be entrepreneurs. Most of my family were apolitical, but by the end of the decade they'd had enough -- I've got relatives in Hydro One, Toronto transit, various school boards, and a couple of hospitals, and they have resolved to become politically active so this kind of mess doesn't happen again.