2016 budget cuts mean future work to rebuild damaged system
The recent release of the 2016 Ontario budget comes with a great deal of promise for students, with the new Ontario Student Grant to allow increased access to university for families of lower incomes. However, while the provincial government has made large strides in education, they have fallen short on providing for the healthcare needs of Ontarians.
Psychiatric and addiction services have both been subject to cutbacks in the budget. The defunding of mental health resources is alarming, especially for young people. Many mental health disorders begin to show symptoms during adolescence and early adulthood and while most conditions are highly treatable, they do require adequate resources in order to be properly cared for.
Over the last year the Ontario Liberals have cut physician salaries by almost seven per cent according to the Toronto Star.
The government has also made it increasingly difficult for graduating medical students to practice family medicine in the province by cutting fifty residency positions and imposing tight regulations on where family doctors can practice.
These policies are driving the next generation of doctors out of the province. In fact, in a recent survey conducted by Dr. Brenna Velker, only a third of medical residents in the province were committed to practicing medicine in Ontario.
Students at the University of Ottawa should be alarmed about this systematic attack on our healthcare,because not only is a massive shortage of family doctors and mental health professionals a serious problem that will impact thousands of lives, it’s not an issue that can be easily fixed.
The longer we ignore these serious problems the longer it will take to solve them and create a health-care system that is once again back up to national standards. Our generation will be left scrambling to solve this, while needing the services of these healthcare professionals who have long since left the province. This lack of services is even more worrying when you take into account Canada’s aging population and the increase in services they will require.
Clearly not all of our doctors are going to pack up and leave all at once. But these trends may encourage enough of them to do so, which means that existing underserved areas may become even more dangerously short on health services. These communities include rural, remote, northern and Aboriginal populations, many of which are already struggling to get equal access to medical treatment.
It won’t be the current government that has to bring doctors back into Ontario while thousands are either underserved or untreated—that burden will fall on us, the leaders of the next generation.
Let’s be vocal about this issue before too much damage is done. As educated and informed citizens of Ontario, we need to stand up and tell our government to stop this systematic destruction of our healthcare.
