SASKATOON – Community health co-operatives are lobbying to become the health-care alternative of choice.
Co-op medicine is not new to the people of Saskatchewan and the national Community Health Co-operative Federation wants to ensure a place for community health care in the province’s new district health board system.
“If the health district boards are too centralized they run the risk of not being able to provide the necessary support for the community that it needs,” said Patrick Lapointe, administrator of Saskatoon’s Community Clinic.
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The clinic is one of the original models of co-op medicine that the federation is urging be imitated. Community Health Centres (CHCs) represent the special needs of the communities in which they are based. In rural areas this means care based on the type of agriculture, cultural groups present and social community boundaries. The co-op health centres also promote the overall health of community members and encourage their participation.
The medicare crisis of the early 1960s spawned 32 co-operative community health boards in Saskatchewan. Not all of these boards survived or operated beyond the successful resolution of the doctors’ strike and the beginning of universal medicare, said Smokey Robson, president of Saskatoon’s Community Health Services Association.
A few CHCs in Regina, Saskatoon and Prince Albert are still operating since that time. Smaller communities such as Strasbourg and Delisle began operating this type of clinic in the 1970s. Midale and Eastend opened co-operative medical facilities in the 1990s.
A medical crisis of a new kind has once again brought the co-operative CHCs to promote their solution to the problem. The reforms to Saskatchewan’s health-care system created 30 district health boards.
The closure of a number of hospitals throughout the province will require the boards to look into alternative health-care delivery vehicles, said Lapointe. The federation is lobbying the government, hoping to gain its support and a “higher profile” for the co-operative health-care model.
In a speech to the Saskatoon Community Clinic’s annual meeting, Lorne Calvert, associate minister of health, said while there was a “great deal of compatibility and mutual interest” between the provincial government and the Community Health Services Association, the future funding and development would be in the hands of the district health boards and not the province.
Calvert encouraged the community health associations to “promote their health-care philosophies and values to district health boards.”
