Beaches-East York MPP Michael Prue is urging the community to launch a campaign to save the doomed out-patient physiotherapist clinic at Toronto East General Hospital.
"If you do nothing, you will lose the physiotherapy clinic," Prue told about 40 people who attended a community meeting at the S. Walter Stewart library on Tuesday, March 9, night."You can stop this government. You are going to have to be brave. You have to be willing to picket. You have to be willing to talk. If you work in the hospital, you have to be willing to work to rule."TEGH is closing the clinic, which costs the hospital $300,000 a year, on April 1 because it expects the province to boost hospital budgets only marginally this year. "Given the (economic) environment, we are assuming we will only get one per cent (more in funding) or so," Marla Fryers, TEGH's vice-president of programs and chief nursing officer, told Toronto Community News in January when the decision to close the clinic came to light."If wages are increasing, let's say 2.5 per cent as a result of union contracts, we know we have to be very careful with the money we have."The hospital is referring clinic patients to other programs in the community, including nine OHIP-funded and 15 private clinics.Prue said it appears the provincial budget will be delivered March 25, giving local residents two weeks to rally to save the clinic.With a provincial election 19 months away, he said residents can make the Liberals squirm over decisions to cut back health care.Prue warned more hospital cutbacks across the province are coming, pointing to the government's Throne Speech this week which highlighted creating hospital centres of excellence for different medical services.In reality, that means the province will concentrate services in select hospitals, leaving residents across the province without easy access to the treatments they need, Prue said.Meanwhile, Beaches-East York Councillor Janet Davis and Toronto-Danforth MPP Peter Tabuns told the audience they are prepared to talk to hospital and government officials to try to save the clinic. Reached Wednesday morning, TEGH president Rob Devitt said the hospital has made the difficult decision to shut the clinic, a service it is not mandated to provide.He likened the situation to pharmaceuticals. Of course, medication, like physiotherapy, helps patients but hospitals don't pay people's drug bills. Some people have private insurance or are covered through government programs based on age or income but many people don't have any drug coverage, Devitt argued."None of these sorts of decisions (cutting a program) are easy or taken lightly," he said."These are challenging choices but at the end of the day, the hospital has to focus on what a hospital is all about and what a hospital is held accountable for."If the provincial budget provides higher than anticipated hospital funding, Devitt said TEGH will look at how the money could be applied to a wide range of services and programs.In addition to Prue, the meeting, organized by the Service Employees International Union Local 1 Canada, featured several other speakers.Patients Maria Meszaros-Nefsky and Salza Khakoo said losing the clinic will be a great hardship for them.Meszaros-Nefsky, self-employed, said she doesn't have insurance to cover private physiotherapy and fears difficulty accessing OHIP-funded clinics."It (accessing health services) is becoming elitist. You have to be either very old or very young or (have) a good job with benefits," she said."Or you don't merit anything at all. You're out of it."Clinic physiotherapist Damian Wyard, also a union steward, said physiotherapists proposed different options to keep the clinic running but hospital officials have not responded.