Funding needed to restore core services, says Etches

Ottawa Public Health needs more resources to fulfil the nonCOVID -19 aspects of its mandate, the agency’s director says.

Medical officer of health Dr. Vera Etches said Thursday that the pandemic response has pulled OPH away from some of its fundamental work, including schoolbased immunization programs for meningitis and dental clinics that have proven effective in keeping people out of hospital emergency rooms.

“We’re concerned about some of the services that we’ve had to cut back because we know there’s direct impacts on the health of the population,” Etches noted at a media briefing.

“We need more capacity to be able to catch up on some of these core services. We can’t do the COVID response and all of this other core programming without more investment.”

She also noted that so much attention is paid to public health work involving COVID-19 case management and contact tracing.

But health promotion, a core tenet of OPH’s mandate, is crucial to keeping the pandemic under control and preventing new infections.

The health unit needs to be able to work with community leaders, adapt its COVID-19 messaging to different languages and cultures, and understand realities on the ground that might prevent people from being able to do things like stay home when they’re sick or follow public health guidance about socializing safely during a pandemic, Etches noted.

“Public health has a basic job that we do, which is health promotion. And a lot of our resources in that regard have been sucked away or diverted to the COVID response,” said Keith Egli, OPH board chair and city councillor for Knoxdale-Merivale.

“COVID doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon, so it’s a discussion that we are going to be having in a more robust way in the coming weeks, as we enter into the fall, as we enter into the budget process, to make sure that the other very important pieces of work that we do … we’re able to continue to do that.”

According to a report submitted June 4 to the Board of Health, OPH was already projecting a deficit for the fiscal year based on activities in the first quarter, which ended March 31, showing that the agency was $280,000 in the red.

“The extent of the shortfall will be determined by the length of the response/recovery associated with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the amount of provincial funding that may be received to offset extraordinary costs,” the report notes.