Update on Thessalon and St. Joseph Island

The facts as we now know them:

Despite what the hospital web site says there are no lab facilities at the Mathews Memorial Hospital or the Thessalon Hospital. Neither has a laboratory license.

Blood is taken at these facilities by hospital staff and sent to the main lab at the Sault Area Hospital for processing.

Both hospitals have been taking blood from community patients for years under these conditions.

If there is now a concern about the legality of this service there is a simple solution: the Sault Area Hospital could apply for a specimen collection center license at the Mathews Memorial and Thessalon sites.  It is an easy process, with minimal cost – less than the cost of gas paid by all the patients that will now be forced to drive to the Sault each year for their blood taking.  The buildings are all ready there, the equipment is there, the skilled staff is there and the transportation network back to the Sault is in place.  It seems like a no-brainer.

If some solution using the hospitals is not found we could end up with one of those “fact is stranger than fiction” situations.  What we could have in these northern Ontario communities is laboratory specimens being drawn in Mathews Memorial and Thessalon hospitals and being driven numerous times a day back to the main Sault hospital laboratory for processing.  Simultaneously, community patients from these same communities are being expected to get in their cars and drive 80+ kilometres to the Sault so they can have their blood taken at a private lab. And, to add to the traffic on the highway 17, the new best interim solution is that Lifelabs will set up a one hour clinic once a week in these communities and drive the blood to the Sault.

On the way back to the Sault the Lifelabs drivers will probably pass the vehicle driving the blood from the patients in the satellite hospitals as well as all the community patients who were not able to make it to the one hour clinic. The big winners are the oil and gas companies and the private labs.  It is craziness for public resources, patient’s time and access to an essential medical service.

LHINs Undercut Integration

Even though I have not met the CEO of the Sault Hospital in northern Ontario I expect he is an honorable person with a difficult task: to justify the unjustifiable.  It is on his orders that the Thessalon Hospital and Mathew’s Memorial Hospital, small rural hospitals, closed their doors to the local community for blood taking. Residents now have to drive 85 kilometers to a for-profit specimen collection center in Sault Ste. Marie.

A column in the Sault Star reports that the CEO said that the Laboratory Licensing Act somehow restricts hospitals from collecting specimens from community patients.  The fact is facilities with laboratories, like hospitals, are explicitly excluded from specimen collection center licensing.  It is this exclusion that has allowed hospitals to collect blood samples from community patients since licensing began in 1973.

The second reason given is that the hospitals need to focus their resources on providing acute care in line with the Public Hospitals Act. I initially thought the reference to the Public Hospitals Act was as much of a red herring as the Laboratory Act reference.  Many hospitals in Ontario still provide x-rays, CT scans and MRIs to community patients and public hospitals have provided lab access for decades. In the many discussions about hospital lab closings around Ontario no one had given a new directive, regulation or legislation as a reason.

It seems, after some more research, that the reference to the Public Hospitals Act has some basis. Ironically, section 52 of the 2006 legislation that established the Local Health Integration Networks (LHIN)(emphasis added) also changed the definition of a hospital.*  Hospitals used to be facilities set up for “the treatment of persons afflicted with or suffering from sickness, disease or injury”: simple enough and broad enough to be of maximum benefit of the community.  In 2006, the Liberal government changed the “purpose” of a hospital to serving inpatients and outpatients registered with the hospital.

I can find nothing in the Act that prohibits hospitals from serving community patients.  Hospitals still do serve many community patients who need a variety of diagnostic and other procedures.  Under whatever provision this work is done it would seem that a similar rule could be applied to lab services.  The Public Hospitals Act also allows the government to make directives in the public interest, for instance, to improve access.  The government could use this very reasonable provision and direct hospitals to provide needed services to their local populations.  This is particularly important in smaller communities where there are no other specimen collection centers.  If all else fails doctors could register all the local residents as outpatients or patients could simply go the emergency and register as patients: a much more expensive but workable option.

But all these machinations miss the point.  The LHINs were set up to integrate, rationalize, amalgamate and restructure health care and it is incongruous that tagged onto the LHIN legislation were restrictions on what services hospitals can provide.  This section reinforces silos within health care and undercuts integration efforts.  For example, community patients must use an out-of-town for-profit lab while hospitals have a local laboratory for inpatients that the community could use.

There is also a broader issue.  To make best use of all our health care resources, we need flexibility to use our core facilities, like hospitals, to maximum advantage and this is inhibited by the change in the definition of a hospital.

The Public Hospitals Act explanation may not be a total red herring, maybe just a little pink, but it still is not justifiable.  It does not pass the smell test.  It is rank that our government restricts the use of a public facility forcing residents to drive 85 kilometers to go to a for-profit lab to have their blood taken.  It may work for the labs shareholders, but the residents of Thessalon, St.  Joseph Island and dozens of other communities in Ontario probably feel differently.

*An Act to Provide for the Integration of the Local System for the Delivery of Health Services, assented to March 28, 2006.  The sections amending other pieces of legislation are left out of further amended acts on the LHINS.