Eric Hoskins • mackaycartoons

Saturday August 5, 2017

August 4, 2017 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday August 5, 2017

This health-care crisis is growing

Hospitals — running over budget, operating beds they don’t have funding for. Emergency rooms — patients stacked up in hallways. Acute care beds — too many blocked, occupied by people waiting to leave hospital but with no place to go. Ambulances — stretched to the limit, often not available at all.

December 21, 2016

It’s an old story. One we would rather not argue about again. But here’s the problem. Things are not getting better, they’re getting worse. And so this old story appears here yet again in hopes it will take on a new sense of urgency.

Hamilton Health Sciences needs to cut $20 million from its budget, St. Joseph’s Healthcare $7 million. In both cases, staffing will be affected, stretching already thin human resources even thinner. Executive staff are being cut as well as front line. In the case of HHS, three senior executives are leaving. And that’s at a hospital system that already spends below the provincial average on administration, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. HHS spends 4.9 per cent on administration, higher than the national average of 4.3 per cent but well below the provincial average of 5.6 per cent. Keep that in mind next time someone declares hospitals would be fine if only they cut senior management costs.

May 10, 2016

Hospitals have seen provincial funding cut repeatedly. The province provided some relief this year with a two per cent increase. That doesn’t even cover inflation.

That’s why it’s so frustrating when Health Minister Eric Hoskins says he doesn’t expect funding to impact patient care. What world do Hoskins and other politicians live in? It’s already affecting patient care. In Ontario, you’re not supposed to spend 48 hours on a bed in a hallway awaiting admission. You shouldn’t expect to wait double-digit hours in the ER. You shouldn’t expect to be told there’s no acute care bed for a sick relative. You shouldn’t expect years-long waiting lists for aging relatives waiting for long-term care. All these are happening and getting more common. (Source: Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

Tuesday May 10, 2016

May 9, 2016 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday May 10, 2016

Ontario Health Coalition holding unofficial referendum on healthcare funding

Healthcare workers and community activists are hoping an Ontario-wide unofficial referendum will raise awareness of the concerns they have about provincial funding.

The Ontario Health Coalition, a group of activists working to improve the public healthcare system, is launching their campaign in communities such as Toronto, Ottawa, Windsor, Sudbury and Guelph on Monday.

“The cuts have been severe in Ontario… we’re doing a referendum because this has pretty much happened by stealth or by talk of not enough resources to go around,” said Albert Dupuis, co-chair of the local Ottawa coalition organizing the campaign in that city.

The group will be distributing ballot boxes to businesses, workplaces and community centres across the province.

The unofficial referendum will ask people if they’re for or against the idea “Ontario’s government must stop the cuts to our community hospitals and restore services, funding and staff to meet our communities’ needs for care.”

The group says healthcare in Ontario has been under-funded for years and is below the Canadian per capita average by about $350 per person.

The Liberals ended a four-year hospital base funding freeze in its latest budget promising to spend $60 million on hospital budgets along with $75 million for palliative care and $130 million for cancer care, but the Ontario Health Coalition has said that isn’t enough.(Source: CBC News)

Thursday, July 24, 2014

July 23, 2014 by Graeme MacKay

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday, July 24, 2014

Bills to safeguard blood, chemo drugs to be reintroduced in Ontario legislature

Ontario is taking aim once again at two pay-for-plasma clinics in Toronto, dusting off legislation to ban paid donations two weeks after Health Ministry inspectors swooped in to seize records at the facilities.

The bill from Health Minister Eric Hoskins is being combined with another proposed law aimed at preventing another chemotherapy “under-dosing” scandal by having hospital pharmacies inspected and licensed.

Hoskins revived the legislation — first introduced before the June 12 election campaign but never passed in the minority parliament — on Tuesday saying it will be a “safeguard” against tainted blood products and troubles with the mixing of cancer medications that 1,202 cancer patients received.

The businessman operating Canadian Plasma Resources clinics said the raid has virtually halted operations in which subjects who qualified were paid $25 to give blood in a “research trial.”

“Since they took our documents we’re now temporarily stopped,” Barzin Bahardoust told the Star.

His company has been waging a battle with the government for months, with the province approving new regulations and insisting Canadian Plasma requires a laboratory licence.

Bahardoust rejects that claim, hence the government’s push for legislation that Hoskins said will make it “unequivocal” that paying for blood donations or accepting payment is illegal.

“We stand firmly against payment for blood or plasma donations,” Hoskins added, noting the 1997 Krever Commission recommended against paid donations to prevent vulnerable people with diseases from selling their blood for cash.

The commission examined the 1980s tainted blood scandal — which left 30,000 Canadians with HIV and hepatitis C from questionable donations, some from prison inmates in the United States. (Source: Toronto Star)