Here's a letter I just submitted to the Toronto Star. Let's hope they print it.

Jeff

End Poverty and Engage Community to Reduce Hospital Spending
Re: Ontario hospitals caught in budget squeeze, by Ian Urquhart, June 18, 2007

	Once again, Ontario hospitals are contemplating service cuts in order to
balance their budgets, and once again, community groups are rightly opposing
them.

	Is there a way to end this recurrent conflict, reduce hospital spending and
improve Ontarians’ health? Abundant research evidence suggests that there is:
the short answer is to focus on preventing illness and injury and thereby the
need for hospital services.

	The most effective way to do this is to tackle the social determinants of
health – poverty, inequality, racism, pollution. If the Governments of Canada
and Ontario made a stronger effort to build affordable housing, invest in
regulated non-profit childcare, expand job training, establish living wages,
support new immigrants, and clean up the environment, they would go a long way
to containing medical costs and improving population health.

	There is something hospitals themselves can do too. Taking a cue from the
Wellesley Hospital, a former teaching hospital in downtown Toronto closed by
the Harris Government in 1998, they can give clients and community members a
more meaningful voice in hospital decision-making. When the Wellesley created a
powerful Neighborhood Relations Committee to improve hospital-community
relations, Community Advisory Panels to guide specific services, and governance
positions for community activists, it not only improved its responsiveness to
community needs but also erased its fiscal deficits.

	These are not new suggestions. But they do bear repeating, for, with few
exceptions, governments and hospitals have taken many steps backward and only
baby steps forward in recent years.

Jeff Denis
Toronto, ON


--
Jeff Denis
PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology
Doctoral Fellow, Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University

"The principle of organizing our society for the benefit of all the people and
not for a privileged few - that is still here and that is a principle to which
we adhere." - Tommy C. Douglas

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