The chair of the Ottawa Public Health (OPH) board says he will fight to protect the agency’s mandate and keep it as localized as possible when he and other officials head into consultations this summer, discussing the proposed amalgamation of Ontario’s 35 public health units into 10 regional bodies.
“In a perfect world, I think Ottawa would like to see Ottawa and maybe a little bit more, but … to go all the way to the Quebec border one way and all the way to to Kingston the other way, I think, is hugely challenging to have a proper functioning public health unit.”
Right now, Ottawa Public Health serves a population of a million people over 2,800 square kilometres, according to Egli. He says the initial boundary presented for a restructured Ottawa-area health unit saw that coverage area balloon to 1.7 million people and nearly 29,000 square kilometres.
The government has said it will finalize the new boundaries in consultation with municipalities. Ottawa Public Health has been informed those consultations will begin this July, Dr. Vera Etches, Ottawa’s medical officer of health, told the OPH board on Monday.
It’s expected legislation establishing the new regional entities and their boards for April 1, 2020 would be introduced sometime in the fall, OPH board members heard.
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The province has said the consultations will involve technical working groups, but Egli and Etches said they’re still waiting on additional details about the consultations’ time frame and format.
The consolidated agencies’ new boundaries are just one of the issues at play in the province’s plan to “modernize” the public health units. Etches said many questions remain about the structure and responsibilities of the 10 regional boards that would oversee each of the 10 units, and how those agencies will be funded — all issues she can see coming up during the consultations.
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“For me, I’ve said consistently since the beginning that the first domino to fall, I think, has to be the boundaries because so much comes from that,” Egli chimed in.
Public health employees continue to be concerned about “the lack of details around modernization” and how they might be affected, Etches told the OPH board. She said she continues to distribute information as it comes through weekly emails to staff.
Because OPH is so “integrated” with the City of Ottawa, those concerns extend beyond the agency, Jamie Dunn, executive director of the Civic Institute of Professional Personnel, told board members. (CIPP is the bargaining agent for 400 Ottawa Public Health employees, he said.)
Dunn said he’s received “a lot” of calls from employees in other city departments who support OPH who are worried their jobs might also be in jeopardy with the proposed merger.
The uncertainty surrounding the consolidation also “threatens staff retention” from a labour relations point of view, Dunn argued.
“Staff are worried about which union will succeed and which terms and conditions of work will prevail in a merged public health agency,” he said, noting as an example that urban and rural public health employees are paid at different rates.
Dunn also argued that negotiating a new collective agreement could be complicated, time consuming and costly.
Board approves OPH strategic plan
As it faces many unknowns, the OPH board went ahead and approved a new strategic plan for the agency on Monday evening.
The plan outlines four “strategic directions” for the agency from 2019 to 2022, as well as the following five goals for 2019-2020 specifically:
- “Drive innovative approaches to mental health and substance use;
- Healthy communities by design;
- Streamlining through digitizing;
- A health workplace and workforce;
- Continuously improve our core work to maximize impact.”
“You can’t change a whole system all at once. You can establish a regional board but someone needs to deliver the services to the people. And I think that this plan is really important to focus on the priorities that we’ve heard about that aren’t going to change for the people in the city of Ottawa.”
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“Obviously we’re very cognizant that there’s this parallel process going on to change the way public health operates in the province but we can’t be paralyzed by that process,” Egli added after the meeting.
“We have a million patients out there. We have a million clients and they have health concerns every single day, and we can’t just put everything on hold until Queen’s Park figures out what it’s going to look like. Then we wouldn’t be doing our jobs.”
The OPH board is next expected to meet in the fall.
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