Health-care debate an unfair fight (by Virgil Grandfield)

Health-care debate an unfair fight
Written by Virgil Grandfield
Saturday, 12 September 2009
Aug. 28, The Herald printed LPN Cynthia Haskins’ pro-DAL letter, even though many public health professionals in the province who would probably strongly disagree with her are currently subject to a gag order under Alberta Health’s new Code of Conduct. That hardly seems like a fair fight.
I understand the perceived injury to Ms. Haskins’ professional pride and think she must be a remarkable caregiver, wherever she works. Her comments, however, certainly missed the mark. I don’t believe anyone who ever visited or needed St. Michael’s long-term care units would recognize the picture Ms. Haskins painted of public nursing care, a picture that seemed a rendition of the apparently scripted viewpoints of the government’s local MLA.
Ms. Haskins also, perhaps unintentionally, invalidated our city’s seniors who have been speaking about unnecessary tragedies due to the misguided shift of senior care from the publicly administered health-care system — which they built — to the patchwork, profit-oriented DAL system whose primary focus is to get senior care off the government’s books and profits into pockets.
LPNs are surely appropriate for many tasks, but, if allowed to say so, public health professionals might mention late-night fiascos and emergency-room runs and other serious problems caused by this new parallel private system that does not allow for hiring of RNs to run senior care facilities and supervise care of patients of DAL facilities with as many as 200 highly vulnerable senior citizens.
They might also express concern about placing dementia and other patients in institutions where the government only requires bottom-line operators to guarantee two hours per day of direct care per patient, by poorly paid, non-professional care staff with extremely high turnover rates. If the government had not issued its gag order, health professionals would probably answer Ms. Haskins with the dirty truth: the DAL system was already broken before this big push to get seniors into the for-profit facilities now mushrooming around our city.
Perhaps The Herald should adopt a policy that, until the gag order is lifted, you will either offer to anonymously publish letters of public health-care professionals, or refuse to give corporate-managed health-care workers incontestable space to speak in favour of deregulation of senior care and our public health-care system. Until then, the rest of us will have to defend our public health-care system the best we can in an unfair fight.
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