Prince Edward County Council has heard from South East Public Health about their post-merger status.<\/p>\n
Southeast Public Health Board Chair Nathan Townsend spoke to council during Tuesday\u2019s meeting, outlining the current status of the health unit after the completed merger.<\/p>\n
In his presentation, Townsend broke down the role of Southeast Public Health as working on projects and services to keep the public healthy, rather than primary health care which helps people who are sick. In that role, public health does a lot of work to educate the public about potential health hazards and best practices. Public health also provides programs designed to help improve people\u2019s overall health, with an example given in programs designed to help people quit smoking.<\/p>\n
Another major focus of the presentation was the post-merger harmonization. Ever since the former public health units that became South East Public Health merged, there have been efforts to ensure all communities covered by the new organization are paying equally into it. Townsend remarked that over time, provincial contributions to health units has declined. While they were originally established with 75% provincial funding and the rest from local communities, the provincial contribution has not kept up with inflation. Provincial contributions have only been increasing at a rate of 1% per year, effectively being a reduction as inflation outpaced the increases, and more costs fell on municipalities. As a result, some communities have seen significant increases to their public health contributions under harmonization, with the new unit being effectively funded at 70% provincial and 30% municipal to avoid program cuts.<\/p>\n
While discussing the presentation, Councillor Bill Roberts said that some serious advocacy work is needed to get the province to provide more funding for Public Health.<\/p>\n
\u201cOntario has the lowest per-capita investment in public health in the country, way below average,\u201d said Councillor Roberts. \u201cWay below the national average, of course, in terms of funding gaps. When you look at \u201926\/\u201927 in terms of health care as an entire envelope for the ministry, you\u2019re looking at a 1.6% cut below the inflation rate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Councillor John Hirsch suggested that more work needs to be done to educate the public specifically on the role of public health.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think one of the main issues probably is that much of the public doesn\u2019t understand what is a health unit. What does public health do? They have no idea,\u201d said Councillor Hirsch. \u201cAnd the province then thinks they can get away with 1% a year and just let the service gradually decline. And we can\u2019t let that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Council accepted the presentation for information, but took no further action at this time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prince Edward County Council has heard from South East Public Health about their post-merger status. Southeast Public Health…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[3735,3736,49,48,84,392,44,3733,3731,3734,3729,3730,3737,3732],"class_list":{"0":"post-590835","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-bancroft","9":"tag-brighton","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-canada","12":"tag-health","13":"tag-healthcare","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-pec","16":"tag-picton","17":"tag-prince-edward-county","18":"tag-quinte","19":"tag-quinte-news","20":"tag-quinte-west","21":"tag-trenton"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}