A large coalition of health care workers and concerned citizens gathered in a demonstration at the provincial legislature in Toronto last week.
Vicki McKenna is a Registered Nurse and the provincial first vice-president of the Ontario Nurses Association.
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The Ontario Nurses’ Association represents some 60,000 registered nurses, nurse practitioners, registered practical nurses and allied health professionals as well as more than 14,000 nursing student affiliates in Canada’s most populous province.
Members of the Ontario Health Coalition (OHC), the Ontario Nurses’ Association (ONA), other unions and citizens from across the province were at the provincial legislature in Toronto to express their concern over the slow but steady erosion of the public health care system which coincides with the growth of more private clinics.
Canada has a “universal” health care system, meaning everyone has access to health care paid through public funds. In the past decade or so, more and more private clinics are being set up in Ontario and in other provinces.
Proponents say that private clinics allow those who can afford it to seek faster health-care services. They say this removes them from the sometimes very long waiting lists in the public system making it faster.
McKenna says our in public health care system, all Canadians whether rich or poor, get the same treatment in our hospitals. But she says what is happening in Canada has happened in other countries where that egalitarianism is being eroded by privatisation.
McKenna says private clinics are also siphoning off doctors, surgeons and medical staff from the publicly run hospitals which in some cases leaves the hospitals no longer able to perform certain procedures.
This she says is especially critical in smaller cities and towns where the hospital can no longer provide the service, it requires residents to spend additional time and money to seek the service elsewhere.
She says it also puts a financial burden on individuals where public health care coverage may not cover certain procedures in private clinics. It also puts an additional burden on the health care system to pay the higher costs for treatment at private clinics.
While the actual legal status of private clinics is somewhat of a grey area in Canada, McKenna says the ONA would like to see an immediate moratorium on private clinics until a proper discussion on their necessity, and impact on public health care and hospitals has been undertaken to determine if they first of all have a place in the Canadian health care system, and if so, to what extent.
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