Medical Tourism
An open letter to the Minister
A joint letter from the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario, Association of Ontario Midwives and AOHC calls on the newly minted Minister of Health, Eric Hoskins, to put a stop to medical tourism.
Medical tourism refers to generating profits by soliciting patients from abroad, a practice currently in progress in Toronto hospitals, and one that will represent a shift to for-profit, private health care and damage universal access for Ontarians.
There are no surplus nurses, midwives or doctors in the province. If hospitals believe they have such a surplus, this unused capacity should be put toward shortening wait times for Ontarians, who ultimately keep the system running through taxes.
Read the letter to Minister Hoskins.
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Register now for Health Promotion and Community Development Professional Learning Event
October 21 & 22
Registration is now open for the Health Promotion and Community Development Professional Learning Event. The event will take place October 21 and 22 at the Columbus Centre & Sala Cabota in Toronto.
This is a peer driven dynamic learning event designed annually with you, to build on new thinking and strategies; share tools, methods and good practices; and achieve and demonstrate results for people and community-centred health and wellbeing.
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Nightingale-on-Demand
Business Continuity Testing
Nightingale, in partnership with AOHC and three member organizations successfully tested the Business Continuity Environment (BCE) for Nightingale-on-Demand (NOD) the weekend of August 16/17. The BCE provides a back-up to the NOD EMR system.
Many thanks to:
- Dan Zhang - Oshawa CHC;
- Karen White - Belleville Quinte CHC;
- Diane Doxtater - South East Ottawa CHC;
- Catherine Nagora, AOHC EMR Team
The centres tested a transition from the AOHC Nightingale On Demand system to the BCE and then back again. This took place on Saturday evening during the regular Nightingale Maintenance window. The entire test took less than 90 minutes but validated that the system can be successfully and smoothly transitioned as an alternative.
The BCE will allow clinicians to use a Read-Only version of NOD during any outages in the primary and secondary NOD instances. Clinicians would be alerted with a special water mark and splash page communication to make them aware that any updates and edits will not be saved during that time.
In the event that NOD instances go down, the BCE will be made available within 90 minutes to ensure clinical services can continue to be provided at centres. The BCE is accurate to within 2 hours of the production system. A communication protocol incorporating the NODSQUAD email distribution list has been developed and was tested this weekend.
Nightingale will support the BCE at no additional cost to the AOHC members for the next 12 months. After this time, centres will be able to elect to purchase the service; assuming there is enough market demand for it. AOHC's IMS Team continues to work with Nightingale on this service enhancement.
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Information Management Committee (IMC) and sub-committee changes
As of July 2014, Michelle Hurtubise has stepped down from her role as the IMC Chair, and Lee Kierstead (former IMC Co-Chair) has taken on the IMC Chair role.
It was decided at the August IMC meeting that Lee Kierstead would be stepping down as Chair of the Operations Committee and Michelle Hurtubise will now be taking over this role. Due to this change, Michelle Hurtubise has stepped down from her Chair role on the eHealth Alignment BAC (eHA BAC), and Allan Madden has agreed to take over the eHA BAC Chair role.
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| Conferences and workshops |
