Outaouais is mobilizing for its health care

A resident of the Gatineau region who had to go to Laval for an emergency operation adds his voice to a movement mobilizing “for regional health equity”

Simon Lanteigne will remember the summer of 2024 for a long time, his 40th birthday. On June 24, he cut his right thumb while cutting a board with his table saw. Bloody finger, severed tendon, he presented himself at the Gatineau hospital. He received emergency care there, but could not have surgery due to a lack of a plastic surgeon.

For a week and a half, there was anxiety. Can we save his tendon? Will he lose the use of his thumb? The emergency doctor cannot find a hospital in another region to operate on him.

In the middle of the night on July 4, Simon Lanteigne, anxious, decided to travel to the Cité-de-la-Santé in Laval, nearly 200 km from home. There, no one is waiting for him. He presents himself for triage in the emergency room – like any other patient – ​​with a simple request from the emergency doctor in Gatineau, Dr.^r Peter Bonneville, who reports the “break in service” of which his patient is the victim.

Simon Lanteigne was finally operated on at the end of the day by a plastic surgeon from Cité-de-la-Santé who, ironically, had already worked at the Gatineau hospital. The specialist manages to repair the tendon, despite the delay.

Six months later, his thumb, still bulging, flexes downwards and upwards. But Simon Lanteigne keeps a bitter taste from this experience.

“It’s like the health system is letting you down,” said the father of two, sitting at the family kitchen. When you need it, it’s not there. »

Shirt collar folded tightly over his sweater, Simon Lanteigne looks like a schoolboy on this December morning. Calm as the little snow-covered woods behind his house, from which a young deer appears.

But today, the citizen wants to make his voice heard.

Over the past year, four plastic surgeons have left the hospital due to a lack of operating time. Last summer, only one stood guard.

SOS Outaouais

Simon Lanteigne is part of SOS Outaouais, a coalition of organizations and citizens whose mission is to improve health care and social services in the region.

Established by the Outaouais Health Foundation in June, the group denounces the underfunding of health in the region, estimated at $200 million annually, according to the Outaouais Development Observatory.

At the end of October, SOS Outaouais published a manifesto “for regional health equity” highlighting five years of recognition, by the National Assembly, of the “particularities of the Outaouais” and its “significant delay” in matters public financing of health. Some 1,000 citizens signed his plea.

The health care crisis has continued to make headlines for a year in Outaouais. Exile of medical imaging technologists to Ontario, shortage of nurses, lack of doctors in certain specialties… In mid-December, two or three operating rooms were open at the Gatineau hospital out of a total of seven, according to the chief physician of the general surgery department at the CISSS de l’Outaouais.

Citizens often question the mayor of Gatineau, Maude Marquis-Bissonnette, on this subject. They tell him their “touching” and “unfair” story. “These people are entitled to the same treatment as in other large cities in Quebec. »

Maude Marquis-Bissonnette makes health a priority. Since her election in June, she has met the Minister of Health twice. She claims to have “good listening” from Christian Dubé, “very sensitive to the reality” of her border region with Ontario.

However, she urges Quebec to act. The government can only bet on the future Gatineau hospital which “will open in ten years”. According to her, it is necessary, among other things, to adjust the salaries of health professionals in Outaouais, based on the higher remuneration of staff in Ontario.

A prefect at the front

North of Gatineau, nestled between forests, lakes and rivers, rural communities are also mobilizing for their health care. They are demanding better funding for the Outaouais.

“We are 40 years late! “, says the prefect of the MRC Vallée-de-la-Gatineau, Chantal Lamarche, sitting in her office in Maniwaki, a five-minute drive from the hospital.

Dazzling with her red tunic, her short platinum blonde hair and her bracelets, the elected official fights to defend the health services of her 20,000 citizens. It has several feats of arms, such as having obtained the departure of the CEO of the CISSS de l’Outaouais in 2019. Three years later, the CISSS appointed a director dedicated to the Vallée-de-la-Gatineau and responsible for improve care and services there.

Chantal Lamarche is now demanding that this director have free rein to advance his files. Since the reform by Minister of Health Gaétan Barrette in 2015, decisions remain centralized in Gatineau, she is indignant. But there is no question of giving up.

Quebec has extended its bonus of $22,000 to all medical imaging technologists in Outaouais following pressure from their union and local elected officials.

“Not optimistic”

The D^r Peter Bonneville, president of the Council of Physicians, Dentists and Pharmacists of the CISSS de l’Outaouais, has been alerting the Quebec government to the problems in his region since the spring. He held a press briefing in May at the National Assembly alongside the Liberal MP for Pontiac, André Fortin. His petition, launched a month earlier, collected nearly 30,000 signatures.

Despite the current mobilization, he is “not optimistic”. Its CISSS must slash 90 million to achieve the budget balance required by Santé Québec. It is a “mission impossible”, according to him, which will affect services. An observation shared by the new Outaouais Solidarity Coalition, made up of organizations and unions.

Gatineau resident Denise Robert believes that her region is being left behind. She had to transport her elderly mother to Maniwaki hospital, an hour and a half drive from Gatineau, so that she could receive a cortisone injection which lasted 10 or 15 minutes.

“We have to come here if she doesn’t want to wait a year at the Gatineau hospital,” she explains, upon leaving the Maniwaki hospital center.

With the taxes he pays, Simon Lanteigne would have liked “a return on investment” during his accident. However, he considers himself “lucky” in his bad luck. Head of a labor relations department, he has a partner who supported him, a car that transported him to Laval and the money needed to pay for a night in a hotel after his operation.

Not everyone is so lucky. It is for them that he dares to go to the front.