Late last week the City of Kawartha Lakes welcomed two new deputy paramedic chiefs to the Kawartha Lakes Paramedic Services team. Sara Johnston and Patricia Bromfield will begin their new roles for the municipality effective January 13.
However, why has the City hired two deputy chiefs for this position when it only had one before?
Beginning next week, Kawartha Lakes Paramedic Service will welcome two new Deputy Chiefs to their team. Sara Johnston and Patricia Bromfield will begin their new roles for the municipality effective January 13.
New year, same result. That, in a nutshell, describes the ongoing challenges many families in the City of Kawartha Lakes, Haliburton County, and Northumberland County face to pay for healthy food.
Gaston Tremblay remembers camping and fishing in Kawartha Lakes and surrounding areas with his family twice a year in the 1970s and early 1980s. It was a peaceful and tragically short time of his life.
He tried three times over the years to get back here, where he believed things might be better for him. By the time he was 14, though, his then-undiagnosed mental health issues sent him on another path — to his first stay in a psychiatric ward.
Afterwards he found himself homeless and on the streets across Canada, an anguished journey that would last more than 18 years and cost him nearly everything he held dear.
Addiction to drugs runs rampant in Lindsay and towns just like Lindsay. It’s all around us — you just have to look a little.
You tell yourself that you have a handle on it, that it’s not so bad. You catch yourself looking down at that scarred arm. And those twitches you have…there was a time when they weren’t part of the package.
The Kawartha Lakes Health Care Initiative (KLHCI) hosted the third annual Rural Medicine Community Experience Day recently. Forty-four University of Toronto medical students were in attendance.
The first-and-second year students participated in hands-on workshops in suturing and intubation and were actively involved in group discussions regarding rural mental health.
Some recent and proposed changes to the governance model of the Ross Memorial Hospital (RMH) and the provincial act that legally establishes it, has Kawartha Lakes Health Coalition (KLHC) concerned about the future of the hospital and the direction it’s going with its governance model.
KLHC is a local chapter of the provincial health advocacy group known as the Ontario Health Coalition. In a press release issued earlier in the month, the KLHC outlined several concerns, notably the RMH board’s decision to eliminate community memberships and having the board elect itself. The KLHC is also worried about the language in the proposed special act that is to go before the provincial legislature that seems to some to open the door to a future merger or reduction of services.
The results are in from the City of Kawartha Lakes Family Health Team’s most recent survey of patients across the local area. The data revealed some interesting findings on how local residents feel about their local care, the family health team approach, the health care system in general and the main challenges to be addressed.
While the vast majority of respondents indicated they found their health care provider to be caring, friendly and easy-to-talk-to and reported overwhelmingly that their providers are caring, good listeners and thorough, the broader answers were also encouraging.
For the past couple months the Lindsay Advocate has been speaking to employees and former employees of Lindsay’s Central East Correctional Centre. Citing concern for their jobs (and privacy issues) all interviewees requested anonymity. We also spoke on the record to representatives of the union and to Ontario’s Solicitor General.
“We call them broken toys.”
“They are broken. Mentally broken. Some are suicidal, from a career in corrections,” says one retired correctional officer (CO), describing some of his former co-workers.
As an outsider with no experience with the prison system, I had of course expected stories from COs involving mental health. But I thought I would hear stories of trauma that come with having a job that involves providing custody and control for criminals (or those suspected of criminality): the ‘crazy stories’ of fights, drugs, rape and murder. What shocked me was that the more I spoke to COs (current and retired) the more I learned that the stress these people described was more often about policy, procedure and management then it was about the salacious things I had imagined.
On Monday September 23, Kawartha Lakes Paramedic Service began the first day of the three-month Community Paramedic Pilot program. The program, which was approved by Council in February, was created to help reduce patient re-admission with a focus on seniors at Ross Memorial Hospital in Lindsay.
The Advocate first broke the story last December about the many seniors in our area who were falling through the cracks and not getting the care they needed. Soon after, Council stepped up to provide funding to paramedics to try and address these needs.
