Future unclear at centre
Emotions are expected to be running high as the Windsor Essex Community Health Centre holds its annual general assembly meeting on Tuesday, but few answers are expected to be forthcoming.
Staff and physicians from the Teen Health Centre and the agency’s other entities continue to seek answers.
Six longtime employees were fired several months ago under a new strategic plan by the health centre — a $10-milliona-year agency created by the merger of the teen health centre and Sandwich Community Health Centre.
Physicians and employees wonder whether they will be consulted, said Dr. Joslyn Warwaruk, president of the Essex County Medical Society, who works at the centre.
A group of the centre’s physicians who met with board leaders over a month ago to voice their concerns have yet to receive any answers.
“I’ll definitely be attending the meeting,” Warwaruk said. “We met with the board and they are still dealing with our concerns. We are still very concerned that our teens maintain a level of good quality care in our community. We are advocating for our teens.
“We want to be part of the planning process. We would like to keep the centre as having one central organization and not break it up into satellite sites. They could be complementary, but we want our services to be teen friendly, accessible — and confidentiality is key for them. They won’t feel comfortable sitting there with seniors next to them.”
“We are trying to be positive and proactive,” Warwaruk said. “That still upsets us, but we can’t change the past. Our thoughts are mostly around maintaining good quality care into the future.”
But Tuesday’s meeting is not designed to resolve outstanding issues, said Shelby Rohrer, spokeswoman for community health centre and teen health centre.
“This meeting really has nothing to do with that,” she said. “Every non-profit has an annual general meeting. This is an opportunity to bring our staff and community partners together with our board.
“There will be an agenda. Certainly, it’s not an open forum or platform. It will be an organized meeting led by our board president and ( CEO) Lynda Monik.”
She was aware board leaders had been talking with the physicians, though no information was released.
But another of the teen centre’s physicians, Dr. Andrea Steen, who plans to attend Tuesday’s meeting remains anxious over the changes made and what lies ahead.
“We definitely still have a lot of concerns,” she said. “We’d like to know the general direction where we are going because there are so many rumours.”
She hopes the centre’s various community partners attend the meeting to ask questions about the future.
“I feels like we are in a holding pattern,” Steen said. “There are concerns about transparency and just having answers where teen services are going. It should not be as secretive as it appears to be.
“We need to have a voice. It’s inconceivable to have an organization this big that services so many youth and not have front-line staff, especially leaders, being involved in the process. At this time, that has not happened.”