The Saskatchewan government likes to trumpet the fact that it is a leader in health-care reform. In the spring of 1993, when 52 rural hospitals were closed or, in the government’s words, “converted” to health centres, the bureaucrats and politicians told us they were saving the new health boards the pain of closing their local facilities.
Many people had the impression that the closing of the 52 hospitals constituted health reform. Others, not so trusting, felt that the initial closing was just the tip of the iceberg.
The less trusting were right. Health-facility closures are again in the news.
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Public meetings are being held. Letters are being written. The media is involved.
When Eston was fighting first to keep its hospital and, later when it was irretrievably gone, to keep the hospital building open as an integrated facility (emergency health centre and long-term care facility) many people both in and out of the community said those leading the fight should butt out, things were OK.
It is becoming painfully obvious that things are not OK. Not in Eston, and not across the province. While one does not rejoice in another’s pain, there is some satisfaction in saying “I told you so.”
The government says the health districts are now making the decisions to close facilities.
The health districts say they must do this because there is no money. But the problem is not that there is no money for health care – the problem is in the way the government is funding the districts.
Rather than giving a district a set amount of dollars to meet its needs and priorities, the government allots money by category – long-term care, acute care and something called community care.
In keeping with the new “wellness” model of health (as opposed to the pre-reform “illness” model), community care gets the most dollars.
This goes to services such as home care, but it has also caused some health districts, in an effort to use their community care money or lose it in the next budget year, to undertake such activities as sex and smoking surveys in high schools, bike and farm safety programs, and training facilitators to help groups in a community identify their goals.
In the meantime, our elderly – who should be able to die in their own communities, premier Roy Romanow told an Eston audience – are having their homes closed and being shunted around to wherever there happens to be a free bed. I’ve asked it before and I ask again – if this be wellness, why do I feel so sick?
