A new survey released by the Ontario Medical Association’s chronic pain management section shows how patients are responding to the news of the Ontario government’s proposed cuts to health-care services.
The provincial government is proposing to reduce the frequency of nerve-blocking injections, a crucial therapy for thousands of chronic pain patients. Under the proposed cuts, patients who can currently access that service on a weekly or monthly basis would only be able to receive the injections four times a year.
One question on the survey asked patients to describe how service reductions would impact them.
One person responded to the anonymous survey by saying they would not be able to “work on a regular basis. Quality of life would be unbearable. Would never get out of bed … depression would get so severe, like not wanting to live.”
“Without the injections, I will, unfortunately, return to severe and debilitating pain episodes and revert to opioids again,” another respondent said.
The survey also showed a series of graphs pointing out what patients would do as an alternative if cuts to their treatments were to happen.
Forty per cent of respondents said they would access prescription opioids, 15 per cent said they would use illicit substances and 32 per cent said they would go to the emergency room.
Sean Crabb, a patient at the CPM Centres for Pain Management in Oshawa, is among those suffering from chronic pain.
“It’s when you can’t do simple things. It takes away from the person … and then the pain’s there, and you can’t go and sit on that boat ride or (go) down to the park sometimes. It makes you feel bad and down. You take away all of this (treatment), and it takes you into a dark place that’s not nice,” he said.
Dr. Peter Blecher, who administers pain treatments to Crabb, said the cuts to nerve block injections would lead to the closure of pain clinics across the province.
“The reality is if the government were to impose these limitations, it wouldn’t just mean four needles four times a year. It would actually mean zero needles zero times a year because virtually all pain clinics in Ontario, community-based pain clinics, would find themselves in a financially unstable situation and would have to shut down,” he said.
The OMA’s chronic pain management section told Blecher negotiations with the government are still ongoing, but if passed, clinics like Blecher’s could shut their doors as early as the fall.