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Silverstone – let’s do it

Letters

Editor:

Three and a half years after Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) signed a contract with Trellis Senior Services to build and operate a new long-term care facility on the Sunshine Coast, it at last appears that this project can come to fruition. The new facility, Silverstone, is proposed for a location in West Sechelt. Finally the project has a receptive local government and the expressed support of provincial MLA Nicholas Simons and VCH.

There are some who continue to oppose the build and operation of a publicly funded health care facility by a private, for-profit, company. Nonetheless, the previous Liberal and current NDP governments as well as VCH have consistently made it clear that there are no public funds available for this project and the contract with Trellis Senior Services will be honoured.

Through extensive negotiations, most of the initial concerns raised with the choice of a private operator for the new facility have been addressed. These concerns included employee wages and benefits and job security as well as the accommodation of volunteer services at Silverstone both by individual friends and family members and amazing groups like the Sunshine Coast Healthcare Auxiliary. Silverstone will also include a badly needed new hospice unit, the details of which are still being worked out by VCH, Trellis and the Sunshine Coast Hospice Society.

For those who have voiced concerns regarding the quality of care provided to residents in privately operated facilities, it is important to point out that lapses in quality of care have been reported across Canada for both publicly and privately run facilities. When such lapses occur there has almost always been a failure of inspection or supervision of the involved facilities by government regulatory agencies. From the day that the contract with Trellis Senior Services was signed, VCH has emphasized that the quality of care provided to residents of Silverstone will be equal to that in a publicly run facility and that Trellis will be held accountable for any deviations from the expected standard of care for its residents.

For further reassurance, it is worth noting that Trellis’s Gemstone long-term care facility in Kamloops, a facility similar to what Silverstone is intended to be, has received an “Exemplary” rating from Accreditations Canada. This rating is higher than that received by many public long-term care facilities in the province.

While we continue to wait for the building of Silverstone to begin, countless numbers of our senior citizens have suffered and continue to suffer due to the ongoing shortage of long-term care beds in our community. They endure lengthy, costly and unnecessary stays in an overcrowded acute care hospital simply because there are insufficient long-term care facility beds in our community to accommodate them. This constant overcrowding has created an unhealthy and unsafe environment for patients, doctors, nurses and support staff at Sechelt Hospital.

Let’s as a community get behind the creation of the new Silverstone long-term care facility and those desperately needed new beds.

The time has come – let’s just do it!

Dr. Jim Petzold, Roberts Creek