LHINs

Protecting Jobs during LHINs transitioning

The Ontario Government’s Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) are merging local health bodies into 14 large regional districts across the province. They threaten to centralize health care delivery, putting treatment centres farther away from patients, job security for health care workers is at risk, patient care and public control of Ontario’s health care system will be centralized away from local control.

LHINs will transfer health services from one location to another. If a health service was transferred from Clarington to Pickering, health care staff working in the unit may have to transfer as well… or not. We don’t know, and neither does the government. Nobody does right now.

Even more importantly, patients and families would also have to travel long distances to treatment centres that were once closer to their own communities.

LHINs will lead to privatizing health care services. There is nothing stopping the government from moving medical services out of hospitals – where they are covered by OHIP – into for-profit clinics that will require people to pay for health care.

SEIU Local 1 Canada has launched a LHINs ALERT public awareness campaign to educate its members about how LHINs is not about patient care – it’s about saving money.