Health centre concerned over city budget.
Immigrant Women's Health Centre staff members Anna Cioffi, left, and Sharisa Mohamed stand outside the centre's Mobile Health Clinic on Tuesday in the Sheppard Avenue and Yonge Street area.
Staff photo/JUSTIN SKINNER
Should the city continue with a series of proposed budget cuts, it would lead to a devastating decrease in access to health services for newcomer women across Toronto.
One of the many services facing the axe is the Immigrant Women's Health Centre's Mobile Health Clinic.
The mobile clinic - it operates out of a Winnebago - connects patients in communities throughout the city with doctors. Counselors from the Immigrant Women's Health Centre help bridge any language barriers.
The Mobile Health Centre visits some 900 women a year, working with roughly 100 organizations often in at-risk communities, facilitating doctor's visits with women in over a dozen languages.
Reaching out to various communities twice a week, it offers services from pap smears to breast exams to screening for sexually-transmitted infections (STIs), pregnancy tests, birth control prescriptions and much more.
Whereas many organizations faced 10 per cent budget cuts in the new budget, the Immigrant Women's Health Centre was looking at a funding reduction of 27 per cent because many of the patients they see are adults and the city is looking to save children's programming first and foremost.
"We'll have to cut not only staffing but how many times we can go out (in the Mobile Health Clinic) and maybe cuts to the doctors we have getting paid," said Immigrant Women's Health Centre counselor Sharisa Mohamed.
Making the potential cuts even more dangerous is the fact that many of the services offered would likely not be front-of-mind for the women the clinic serves. Due to language barriers and other factors, issues surrounding sexual health often go unreported and untreated.
"There are factors like religion issues where women will not go to a male doctor for a pap smear," said Mobile Health Clinic coordinator Anna Cioffi. "There's a stigma attached to STIs and a lot of women will take care of their families and usually not seek help for themselves."
In time, some STIs can lead to infertility or even death. That is to say nothing of women who might not give themselves regular breast exams because their culture does not place a high emphasis on doing so.
"We have a holistic way of looking at health care, with follow-ups, workshops and information in our handbooks," Cioffi said. "If we get cut, we can definitely say, 'you know what? You're killing women."
"Health care is not gravy," Mohamed added.
While the Immigrant Women's Health Centre is located in the College and Bathurst streets area, the mobile health clinic travels to communities across Toronto. Cioffi said staff at the centre called all city councillors to point out where it had helped residents in their respective wards.
The clinic works with not-for-profit agencies across the city, who set up appointments for women. The appointments allow women to see a doctor in between their busy schedules - on breaks from lunch or between ESL classes for example - and are far more convenient than having the women travel to a doctor's office and wait to be seen.
In addition to working with not-for-profits, the clinic will occasionally travel to factories and hotels with large immigrant and refugee workforces. At times, it will even hold Sunday clinics to cater to nannies.
The Immigrant Women's Health Centre even offers free health care to women who have yet to receive an OHIP card.
They do all that with funding that is already stretched as tight as possible without cutting services.
"The budget that we have is a really, really skeletal budget," Cioffi said. "The services we provide are way beyond the money they give us."
Dr. Sheila Wijayasinghe, who saw patients as the mobile clinic visited North York's Afghan Women's Centre this morning, noted that there are a huge number of barriers standing between many newcomers and proper health care, particularly when it comes to issues such as sexual health and sexual abuse.
"Sex in general can be a difficult thing to talk about in a cultural sense," she said. "Here, women are free to speak about their concerns. Sometimes they won't talk about these things if they have a male doctor or they don't speak because they have the same doctor as their family."
For patient Nasrin Yousefi, the mobile health clinic allows her to discuss personal issues she might not otherwise have addressed.
"It's more convenient because I don't have to wait for an appointment and I don't feel comfortable with a male doctor," she said through a translator.