A regional three-month long, health-care public input campaign is in its final stretch.
Since mid-April, the North West Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) has been assembling regional opinions on health care for its "Guide Your Health" outreach. The process will inform priority spending and programs in the LHIN's upcoming Integrated Health Services Plan for 2016-2019.
It's the fourth such process the LHIN has undergone since it launched in 2007.
"The campaign … is really a validation of what we've been hearing for the last three years, based on the work we've been doing to bring care to people," said North West LHIN CEO, Laura Kokocinski.
Kokocinski has seen as shift in regional priorities over the last decade, from a focus on seniors programs to the current push toward improving primary care and mental health.
"They want to know they can access primary care -- so whether or not that's a physician or a nurse practitioner -- that they can get those services when they need it and then they can determine what kind of care they require.
“And certainly, we're hearing a lot more with mental health and addictions. More resources need to be put into that area to help people to be able to stay at home, to be able to get jobs, to remain in their communities and be effective citizens."
Heather Woodbeck was among those pushing to strengthen mental health and addictions programming at the LHIN's Monday's morning session.
Woodbeck is the Registered Nurses of Ontario long-term care best practice coordinator.
She called mental health the "poor sister of the health system," pointing out older adults with behaviour issues due to poor mental health are falling through the cracks into homelessness and the prison system instead of getting the help they need.
"Mental illness shouldn't be the poor sister of the health care system where they go in and have to wait in emerg," she said.
"We have the hospital unit but it's often full and there's a waiting list. We heard today there's an issue with youth having a place to go. Well, there's also an issue with seniors so we have to look at those psychiatric beds and say, 'we need a safe place.' What's happening at St. Joe's is good, the medium-term mental health unit going into place, but we also need a place for people with chronic illnesses that they can be safe and it shouldn't be the jail."
Jules Tupker chairs the Thunder Bay Health Coalition. The former union representative is urging the LHIN to design ways for front line staff to speak directly and effectively to both administration and system designers about their concerns.
"The people I talk to are the front line workers, the people on the floor at the homes in the hospital and they tell us the problems that are occurring. Yet, we hear from the LHIN that things are going very well, there isn't really a big problem. We know there are huge problems."
The final public consultation will take place Tuesday at the Oliver Road Community Centre at 5 p.m.
