From hospitalized to health minister
Serious injury last year gave Elliott new insights on workings of system
A year after suffering a serious head injury, Christine Elliott marvels that, not only has she achieved a full recovery, but she is helming the health system that helped make it happen.
An accident at her cottage left her with a broken temporal bone at the base of her skull and saw her hospitalized for a month and a half. She had to undergo months of rehabilitation to fully regain her ability to walk and speak.
“It struck me that I was sworn in on June 29 and it was June 30 last year that I had my accident,” remarked Elliott, Ontario’s new health minister.
“Within a year ... I feel very fortunate to be able to do this job and I really am very grateful to all the health-care professionals,” she said in an interview on Monday.
Elliott, 63, said her experience as a patient will inform her in her new role.
So too, she said, will her experiences as Ontario’s first patient ombudsman and as the Conservative party’s health critic.
Elliott’s accident occurred in the middle of a rainy night when she went to check whether any water was leaking into the Haliburton cottage, which was still under construction. A step on a temporary staircase gave way, flinging her hard against a wall.
The force of the impact fractured her skull and knocked her out. She lay unconscious on the floor until she was found the next morning by her sister.
“I was literally a bloody mess. I had a huge black eye,” she said.
Elliott said she doesn’t re- member anything about the ordeal, but has since learned about what rough shape she was in. An ambulance took her to Haliburton Highlands Health Services, but had to stop twice because her vital signs were unstable and paramedics needed to work on her.
From the hospital, she was transported by Ornge Air Ambulance to the trauma unit at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. She spent four days in intensive care.
After 10 days at Sunnybrook, she was transferred to Bridgepoint Active Healthcare, where she spent the rest of her hospital stay. She received rehabilitation services at Bridgepoint, first as an in-patient and then an outpatient.
“I could hardly walk. I was on a walker for the first week,” she recounted.
By the end of her hospital stay, she was running on Bridgepoint’s outdoor track.
Elliott said the most challeng- ing part of her recovery involved speech-language pathology therapy: “I had real difficulty retrieving words and speaking in full sentences. I had a lot of pauses and word recall was really difficult.”
When the accident occurred, Elliott was about a year into her role as Ontario’s patient ombudsman, a job that saw her advocate on behalf of patients who had complaints about the health system.
The position required much public speaking and Elliott was concerned about returning to work: “I was worried about it because that is what I did as patient ombudsman … meeting with people, giving presentations about the office, both to patient groups and health-care professionals.”
But by October, she regained her verbal skills. She was discharged as an outpatient after she was able to recite to her speech-language pathology therapist the stump presenta- tion she used in her role as ombudsman.
Elliott said the experience has helped her appreciate just how vulnerable patients can be: “You are experiencing some of the helplessness that you feel as a patient. You are not in control.”
She said she received “excellent care” from doctors, nurses and therapists.
Asked if she witnessed any strains on the health system, she said she observed that some patients were not satisfied with the level of rehabilitation they received.
She said the ordeal was also difficult for her triplet sons — Quinn, John and Galen — now 27.
“My sons of course were terrified,” she said, noting it has been just over four years since their father, former finance minister Jim Flaherty, suffered a fatal heart attack.
In addition to being patient ombudsman, Elliott, a former lawyer, also served for many years as her party’s health critic. The MPP for Newmarket-Aurora, is also deputy premier. She ran for her party’s leadership three times, most recently placing a close second to Doug Ford.
She steps into her new role with much knowledge of the portfolio.
“I am familiar with a lot of the issues, but now I am the one who has to find the solutions. There is a big responsibility there that I do take very seriously,” she said.
Among her first orders of business, she said, will be getting to work on delivering on campaign promises to fix hallway medicine, improve mental health and addiction services and build more long-term care beds.
Asked who Dr. Rueben Devlin will be reporting to in his role as head of a new premier’s council on improving health care and ending hallway medicine, Elliott said he will be advising both her and Premier Ford. Devlin, a former president of the Ontario PC Party and a longtime CEO of Humber River hospital, was appointed to the $348,000-a-year post by the Ford cabinet at their first meeting. On the future of local health integration networks and rumours of a shakeup, she said “it is still early days” and added she is still being briefed on LHINrelated issues by ministry bureaucrats.
Elliott said all health agencies and boards will be reviewed as part of the government’s broader plan to audit all line items in the budget to ensure taxpayers are getting good value for their money. She said she hopes to improve the government’s relationship with doctors and would like to have a contract with the Ontario Medical Association sooner rather than later.