We’ve all been exposed to information on provincial health-care issues, such as doctor shortages and wait times, and how they affect the province.
While that may be useful, have you ever wondered what the health-care picture looks like right here in your own community? In your own hospital?
The Minto Express is about to deliver that information directly to you.
While your local newspaper frequently carries up-to-date information on local health-care issues and events, these upcoming stories go above and beyond anything done previously.
For the next five weeks, The Minto Express will run a series of articles on the state of local health care. By local, we don’t mean across the province or even across the region. We mean right here in Minto – in our own clinics, in our own doctors’ offices, in our own backyards.
The idea began with a story on local doctor recruitment efforts. Through discussions with various industry professionals in the area, that idea blossomed into a five-part series delving into what matters to you as a resident and as a patient of the local health-care system.
Readers will learn about the state of the Palmerston and District Hospital, how the Minto-Mapleton Family Health Team works, emerging roles in health care, what nurses bring to the health-care table, recruitment efforts and more.
Readers will hear it all straight from the local professionals, including doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners and North Wellington Health Care board members. We went right to the people who know, so we can share their knowledge with you.
The truth is, health care is complicated. It gets more complicated all the time when one figures in funding issues, rural medicine, an aging population, partnering services, stringent standards, recruitment efforts and a multitude of other components that make up the health-care system. We feel local residents should know about the good work happening in local health care, as well as some of the challenges.
The articles you’ll read over the next five weeks are a result of months of work — numerous interviews, traveling to various health-care sites, meeting with local health-care professionals, plenty of reading, research, and hours of writing, revising and rewriting. We can’t thank enough the gracious and accommodating nature of the following knowledgeable individuals: Shirley Borges, administrator of the Minto-Mapleton Family Health Team; Alison Armstrong, health care recruiter; Dr. Chris Cressey; Dr. Michael Kam; Dr. Tanya Norman; nurse practitioners Melissa Wright, Katherine Lessard and Jodi Colwill; physician assistant Cailin Hill, medical student Daniel James, registered nurse Ruth Johnston; Palmerston and District Hospital manager of patient care Sandra Hamilton; PDH occupational health and infection control co-ordinator Shane Grace; North Wellington Health Care director and Ontario Hospital Association director David Craig; PDH Foundation development officer Dale Franklin and president and CEO of North Wellington Health Care and Wellington Health Care Alliance Jerome Quenneville. These interviews, and thus the information gathered, would have been impossible without their help and willingness to sit down and speak with The Express.
The result is a comprehensive set of interviews that we feel will help readers understand the local health-care system, and get to know some of the faces within. It’s a benefit to everyone: patients gain a clearer understanding of something that affects them quite profoundly, and local health- care professionals gain a helping hand in distributing the information the public needs to know.
- S.B.