LETTER: Province's plan to improve health care falls short

MidlandToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following is a response to an open letter to the community from Simcoe North MPP Jill Dunlop.

The first improvement Jill Dunlop notes among proposed health service improvements is authorizing pharmacists to write a number of prescriptions. This will have some benefit in speeding up the service as long as there are sufficient pharmacists in the system. It would be an undesirable change if pharmacists are permitted to charge the patient for this service.

The second improvement is permitting certain surgeries to be undertaken in private clinics. The current backlog of surgeries is, pandemic aside, due to a shortage of medical staff and lack of provincial funding. The creation of such private, for-profit clinics, will not automatically increase the supply of trained staff so it is more just a reorganization.

Financially, these clinics introduces one more party to divide the available financial pie. The owners of these clinics want to make some profit on their businesses. Therefore, these clinics will not, in the opinion of the writer, alter significantly the rate of surgeries unless surgeries for cash are permitted which will encourage two- tier medicine.

The third improvement are 160 new undergraduate and 295 post-graduate positions over five years in the supply of doctors. There is nothing wrong with this except it is too low.

The Ontario population is reasonably estimated to grow by 500,000 over this five-year span. The 2021 rate of doctors in Ontario was 2.8 doctors per 1,000 population. At this rate, which is not working too well, the half-million population increase will require over 1,000 extra doctors.

The announced plan will have only produced 900 additional doctors in the same period. In other words the proposed increase by 900 (the assumption is that the 295 positions will be increase incrementally and not all in year 1) will do nothing in reducing the current shortage in working doctors. If the populations growth slows down after the five years then the plan will improve the situation in 10 or more years, which is a long time viewed from a senior’s perspective.

Konrad Brenner
Ramara Township