Have a heart--surgery unit, that is.

The issue of health care in Thunder Bay and region, more than any other, will remain in the forefront of our minds for many years to come. It will not be easily dismissed or put aside for the simple reason that it affects every one of us, and when we or a member of our family are sick, nothing else seems to matter. With an aging population in the North already two percentage points above the provincial average, the need for cardiac care and surgery is compelling and growing. Here are the facts!

Thunder Bay and its surrounding region has the third highest cardiac death rate in the province of Ontario. Patients here wait eight times longer than any other city for intervention. Every day approximately four people suffer a heart attack in the Thunder Bay area. Those who die before getting to the hospital are not even included in the mortality statistics. One third of the affected population is Aboriginal. This percentage is expected to go up as high as two-thirds in the future. The new standard of cardiac care is to do angioplasty on a patient immediately upon arrival in the emergency room. The number of patient lives saved has greatly increased with this procedure. We cannot do it here in Thunder Bay because we do not provide cardiac surgery!

The question we need to ask ourselves is: "Why not?" Thunder Bay Regional Hospital has been designated as the Regional Trauma Centre. How can we be a full-fledged trauma centre when we do not have cardiovascular surgeons on hand to save trauma patients, victims of industrial and auto accidents or cardiac incidents, for example. This fact and the region's high incident of heart disease have placed Thunder Bay Regional Hospital below average for being able to deal with heart attack complications in the annual Hospital Reports, which present a broad picture of the performance of Ontario's acute care hospitals.

Mindful of this situation, the Thunder Bay Regional Hospital, together with Hamilton Health Sciences Corp. (which is part of the McMaster University medical school), submitted a proposal to the Ministry of Health in 1999 to explore the possibility of doctors performing heart surgery here, Currently, heart surgery and other procedures involving the heart such as angioplasty are performed in London, Hamilton, Toronto and Ottawa.

It seems that funding was identified as the major stumbling block for acceptance of this proposal. So let us look at funding issues a bit closer. From our region's point of view money is being taken out of the economy every time we have to travel to the above centres for heart surgery and other procedures such as angioplasty. This usually requires two people to stay over (accommodation and food costs) for one to three weeks, depending on the procedure. In most cases, the air travel requires full ticket price (open ticket) due to the patient being bumped as more urgent cases come up. From the Ministry's perspective, costs include air ambulance for the more urgent cases and about $1 million for the Northern Ontario Travel Grants per year, plus travelling costs and salary for a surgeon from Hamilton for evaluation and follow up. These are just rough estimates, but they provide an idea of the money involved that could be reallocated towards the local cardiac program.

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While we are proud of our giant heart in Thunder Bay, we now realize that for many it is also a sick heart that needs care. The people of this region have demonstrated many times before that on issues of importance to them they can come together like no one else can. We have done so by getting the appropriate funding from the provincial government for the new regional hospital and the new Northern Ontario School of Medicine. Let us do it again with a cardiac surgical unit in our new hospital that will serve the needs of this region for years to come, and save lives. One of those lives could be our own.

Frank Pullia is the Principal of Pullia Accounting & Consulting. He is a former city councillor in Thunder Bay and can be reached at [phone] or via e-mail at [e-mail].