Make sure hospital cuts don’t happen quietly

I have wanted to write this letter for some time, but have not been able to do so for health reasons. This seems like a very appropriate time for it, however.

I spent Christmas 2014 in the hospital (Health Sciences North), having picked Christmas Eve to be diagnosed with pneumonia (not that I had any control over that). As anyone can imagine, a hospital room is not anyone’s first choice of a place to spend the holidays.

While I was hospitalized, I was tremendously impressed by the hospital staff — both nurses and support staff — who were working the holiday.
Working over Christmas is not likely to be the first choice of staff any more than it’s the first choice of patients.

However, every single person I encountered — nurses, orderlies, PSWs, even the people who brought in the meal trays — were cheerful and were also enormously kind and helpful: they went above and beyond the call of duty to make their patients feel as well as they could and to give them the best Christmas possible.

Hospitals are staffed 24/7/365: they are truly a vital service.

This means that some staff will inevitably have to sacrifice holidays and family time to ensure that the vital matter of caring for the sick and injured continues without interruption — such services do not wait for holidays.

The medical professionals — nurses and technicians — go through years of training to be qualified to tend to our health needs: the non-medical staff are also vital to patient care and well-being.

While I thought about how grateful I was to the hospital staff (and was again, on a longer and more difficult stay in the new year), I couldn’t help thinking about the people who determine what those staff members are paid, and which of them get to keep their jobs the inevitable next time that “there simply isn’t enough money — we simply must make cuts to staff and services.” As it happens, that time is now.

It may be inevitable that we are about to lose vital health care services and that dedicated hospital workers are about to be unemployed, through no fault of their own.

We can at least ensure that this does not happen quietly.

We can and should raise our voices to protest the attack being mounted against not only our local hospital, but against health services all across the country by the failure to renew the funding agreement.

This is an election year — traditionally a time when even the most hearing-impaired government is likely to be listening. Let’s hope that they are, and shout.

Chris Cosby
Sudbury