Around 100 people turned out for Protect Public Health Care Sunshine Coast’s (PPHC) April 30 forum in Sechelt to hear a pair of speakers who urged them to consider health care issues when marking their ballots.
Andrew Longhurst, a researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and the author of “Privatization and Declining Access to BC Seniors’ Care – An Urgent Call For Policy Change,” said the main message of his study is that “ownership of facilities matters.”
“Over the last 16 years, health authority owned and operated, and non-profit owned and operated beds, have declined at a rate of 11 per cent,” Longhurst told the audience. “Beds in the for-profit sector, publicly funded beds where the health authority contracts out, similar to the issue at Silverstone … that type of private for-profit delivery for those services has increased at a rate of 42 per cent… We’re not seeing the investments in publicly owned and operated facilities.”
Longhurst argued that his research and other studies show that the quality of care, especially long-term care, is better under a public or non-profit model.
According to Longhurst the shift to more private, for-profit delivery is being created, at least in part, because there’s not enough money coming to health authorities from senior governments for capital projects.
“In Vancouver Coastal Health, that’s been one of the challenges. There are competing capital priorities. There are other needs to expand hospitals and other facilities. For the health authorities, when they don’t have sufficient resources coming from the provincial government, they have to make those decisions,” he said. “Health authorities are put in a very difficult position because it means they can’t make those decisions to expand or maintain services in the public system where the evidence says those commitments need to be made.”
With the forum timed for the middle of a provincial election campaign that’s seen the VCH long-term care plan emerge as a hot local issue, there was also a call to political action.
It came from Edith McHattie of the BC Health Coalition, who said, “There’s an urgent need to protect the system that we have… Underfunding has left the public system increasingly stretched… Health authorities are struggling to increase services.”
McHattie told the crowd that after years of “working with and pushing decision makers to improve our health care system,” this is the one of the first elections where the Coalition has tried to play a bigger role. “I see every day the huge impact that politicians and their decisions have on the services and funding available,” she said.
The Coalition is running its own campaign, called Voting for Public Health Care.
“We are asking voters to pledge their vote to support candidates who will best improve and protect our public health care,” McHattie said, encouraging people to visit their website: www.votepublichealthbc.ca
