At long last the South Bruce Grey Hospital Corporation has made a plan to hold “Community Engagement Meetings” next week in both Chesley and Durham.
Since arriving in this area on April 1st, 2023, CEO Shaw has never seen fit to hold a meeting with the residents of Chesley. Apparently, she has now had an epiphany and realizes that she needs to get to know the residents of the area she serves. Who are they? What do they want? She claims she has never been told. She could have found out had she accepted the invitation to speak at our rally in April 2023, but she did not show up then to meet those residents she has ignored ever since.
She has treated the residents of Durham with similar disdain, reducing their ER hours to part time and ignoring input from local nursing staff who had worked out a schedule that would cover staffing deficits. She announced the decision to remove all inpatient beds without prior notification to their elected officials…giving them the mushroom treatment: keep them in the dark and feed them you-know-what.
Why all this urgency to meet now? Safe to say it is not just a change of heart. No, that would be too simple. The fact is that under the current version of applicable legislation, boards such as these cannot close hospital services without first having a “Community Consultation”. They have to be able to prove they checked in with local residents and secured their agreement or acknowledgement of the situation. Which brings us to this survey.
Residents are being asked to complete a survey to “assist with future planning”. Isn’t that nice? We can have a say in the future of our own community. But a quick look at the document tells a different story. Multiple choice answers are designed to make people feel they have a legitimate choice, but two key questions are clearly biased and have been formulated to support the board’s desired objective.
In survey design, a biased question is one that is formatted in a way that leads you to choose a particular answer. Your answers are interpreted in a way the supports the objectives of the designer.
Let’s start with question 4. “What health care services would you like to see more of in your community?” Choices include primary care, mental health and addictions, cancer services, urgent care centres and so forth. The fact is that you are already entitled to receive these services. By being asked to “pick three” you are denied the opportunity to choose all of them. The board will interpret this to mean you have limited the choices for services you are already entitled to receive. Answer this question at your peril.
Question 6 is a mine trap. The preamble states that you recognize that “we are not able to provide 24/7 emergency services at the Chesley and Durham sites” and then goes on to give you a “choice” of part time hours for these facilities. It’s sort of like a menu at a fast food restaurant: do you want fries with that? If you pick one of the options listed, you are eliminating the possibility of stating that you want 24/7 service. You can’t choose to say that though, so your answers support the goals of the board… a board who does not want to have to provide full time service to our rural communities.
So back to our title. What does “too cute by half” mean and what does it have to do with this survey? Quora.com says it “refers to a sly person who is trying to con or take advantage of other people whom they feel superior to or have a low opinion of, but they fall over their own feet.” This skewed survey is an example. The board is trying to get a desired result to show they have met that criteria for community consultation and the survey questions attempt to get answers that benefit them and their objectives. This is a biased document, and many people have posted their concerns online. They don’t have the right to insist you complete a biased questionnaire. Like many others I wrote in that I am refusing to answer these questions. I hope you will too.
Brenda Scott
Co-chair, Grey Bruce Health Coalition
I refuse to answer the survey, you only want answers to suit your agenda.
We need are hospital and beds back we don’t need a survey we have good care here in Durham hospital please bring back are bed and live are hospital a long please we have very good care in Durham hospital
I was not amused by the survey put out by SBGHC as it only gave you limited answers to choose from ! It should have been like every other survey you take ie. “rate the importance to you on a scale of 1-10”
It leaves me with the impression that they have a hidden agenda they are aiming for to further reduce our hospital services.
They s/b contacting the Southampton group to see how to recruit and make the operation run smoothly! Other facilities don’t seem to have shortages like the SBGHC ! Something is really really wrong.
We deserve quality health care just like anyone else !
The Durham community wants nothing less than full time ER and the return of our beds and adequate staff. NOTHING LESS WILL SUFFICE!
We need our hospital back with full emergency services
I refuse to answer this survey. It is biased and does not allow me to answer the questions with full opinions. It is clear that “The Authorities” are going to do what they want, with little or no regards for the Residents.
We deserve full Healthcare here in Chesley as well as Durham.
Part of the charm of the area is its availability of emergency services in the area and doctors to assess emergency situations thus ensuring timely intervention. By only having emergency open a few hours a day puts people in risk of losing their mobility and in some cases their lives.
I was amazed to learn that since I retired from there beds have been cut on a regular basis so obviously this was the plan all along. Durham needs a hospital with an active emergency.
Tonight I suggested that maybe it’s about time to help with nursing tuitions, either the government or the communities. Having them sign a contract with the community that supports them. Once they pass their tuition loans are paid for, they then have to do a mandatory time in the community that helps them, example 5 year term. The military has been doing this for decades and it’s worked for them. Please don’t tell me that the union would not allow this, the union doesn’t tell them where to go, who to work for and how they paid for their tuition fee.
Bringing back retired nurses is not working, they can’t keep up. They retired for a reason. Giving pay raises to nurses that are paid well enough already hasn’t worked.
Start at the recruiting level.
In May 2023 a provincial program called Learn and Stay Grant was open for applications at Georgian College. The grant provides up front funding for tuition, books and other cost for students enrolled in an eligible nursing, paramedic and medical laboratory technologist program and agree to stay in the community they graduate in for two years. The first nursing students would start in Sept. 2024 and not graduate until 2028. However, only 2,500 spots were available across the province and only 30 in Owen Sound. Over the next decade the estimated need for new nurses in Grey, Bruce and Simcoe Counties is 4,300! The government program is way too little, too late to have any positive impact on the shortages. It does allow the MPP claim to be making a positive difference because most people do not know the details and the real number of healthcare worker shortages.
This survey is misleading and definitely designed to manipulate the citizens of our local community towards accepting “less than” healthcare options because we live in a rural community? Shame on this self serving board. We, as Ontario residents deserve what is everyone’s right in this province to immediately available, local, healthcare delivered by professionals like the ones we had who are now forced to go elsewhere if they want to keep their jobs putting them at a distinct disadvantage and at times unsafe personal risk to satisfy the boards shortcomings in poor planning, seemingly poor financial and fiscal responsibility, no community contact prior to closing our hospital and now look like they are trying to backpedal to address their mismanagement of duties just proving they are not capable, do not have the best interests of the community at heart that they are supposedly serving and should be required to resign. Full stop.