CALGARY, AB: A group of more than 35 health care and community leaders from across Canada have sent a joint open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premiers of the provinces regarding children’s health care crisis in Canada.
The open letter calls for the federal government to get back to the table and hammer out a funding agreement to address the health care crisis, and to fund health care properly into the future. It also calls on the federal government to do a better job on preventative measures like vaccines. It’s signed by health leaders like Dr. Beth Foster, Pediatrician-in-Chief at Montreal Children’s Hospital; political leaders like former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne; the president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions Linda Silas and other prominent community leaders, moms and grandmothers.
The letter states, “Canada recently dropped in stature, earning the dismal rank of 48th on a global child rights index,1 and we are currently in an unprecedented crisis in which kids’ lives are on the line.
This crisis isn’t new. Children’s hospitals and advocates have been raising the alarm that an urgent response is needed at the national and provincial levels to bring leadership and action for kids in Canada. It should never have gotten this far. Our kids deserve better.
While the time for action has long since passed, it’s never too late when it comes to the survival of our children. The stories of parents and grandparents are flooding social media as they desperately try to ease the pain of the child they love and keep them alive. The “tripledemic” of influenza, RSV and COVID-19 is causing incalculable suffering.
Despite the good news children’s Tylenol and Advil are coming, kids can’t breathe. When you have helplessly watched an infant struggle to take a single breath, sat with us in an emergency room for 15 hours, or been sent hundreds of kilometers away from home because there are no cribs left at the children’s hospital, you would understand just how close we are to the breaking point. Children’s life-altering surgeries are being cancelled, and they’re being put on waitlists which further compound their distress.
Haven’t our kids suffered enough? The pandemic has wreaked havoc on their lives. Children have experienced enormous setbacks to their education and mental health and made heroic sacrifices to protect their elders and community. But when the time came for adults to step up and make sacrifices to protect our children, our society has failed them.
This crisis isn’t just hurting kids, it’s destroying our families, our economy, and our future. With sick kids languishing at home, kids are missing out on yet more education. They’re also losing social time with their peers, access to breakfast programs, physical activity, and the care of an adult who’s watching for signs of abuse or neglect.
Single mothers and parents without paid sick days are once again forced to make impossible choices between keeping sick kids at home or keeping a roof over their head and food on the table.
There is a palpable sense of hopelessness amongst parents and those that serve kids on the frontlines. Doctors say the crisis will get worse before it gets better, yet we see no tangible signs of action.
Now is the time for real leadership. Just days ago, 20,000 children rallied from coast to coast to coast for National Child Day, standing up for their rights and calling on you to work with them to find solutions.
Indeed, the solutions exist, and they are within your reach.
It’s time to get back to the table and hammer out a funding agreement to address the healthcare crisis that puts kids at the centre. There must be funding earmarked for children’s healthcare and a commitment to capture data on the health of our children. Many jurisdictions with similar health care systems, including Australia, UK, Germany and Israel, recognize they must pay up to 15 percent more for pediatric hospital services to account for pediatric subspecialty care.
It’s time to listen to paediatric experts who’ve called for an all-out effort to vaccinate children from influenza and COVID-19 and are stressing the importance of everyone using the strategies that we know work, like requiring masks in crowded indoor spaces, staying home when sick, and hand hygiene, to curb the current viral surge and help keep kids in school.
And it is well past time for Canada to appoint an ombudsperson or commissioner for children so that we have strong independent leadership and accountability to lead us through this crisis and get us back to being a world-leading country for kids to grow up in. A collaborative national strategy could strengthen the coordination of the complex inter-connected systems which serve children.
There is nothing that matters more to mothers and grandmothers than the health of our children. An overwhelming majority (95%)2 of Canadians support government to make children a priority by devoting funds and leadership to make life better for kids. It’s time for you to do what Canadians are asking for and put our children first. The future of Canada depends on it. A child’s life depends on it today.
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