By Karen Palmer
Centretown seniors are using a newly created “telephone tree” to fight provincial cuts to home-care funding.
They’ve started a month-long telephone campaign to pressure the province into re-investing $22 million in community-based health care before three Ottawa-area hospitals are closed in the province’s hospital restructuring scheme.
It started with five phone calls to five volunteers asking them to call or write Health Minister Elizabeth Witmer to complain about the cuts. Each volunteer was encouraged to call five other volunteers and they, in turn, were encouraged to call five others.
Like a tree, the network branches out. The idea is to flood the health minister’s office with complaints until change is made.
“There’s no question they keep track of these phone calls,” says Rhoda Abbey, 76, from her Nepean Street apartment, where she co-ordinates the teletree. “We’ve had politicians tell us they pay attention.”
This is the first time the teletree has been used to lobby for a local issue. Since it was formed last year, the teletree has been used twice to tackle province-wide projects, once with success, says Abbey.
“There was a telephone tree done provincially in March of last year on the subject of long-term care homes being short of money. We had the teletree and about two or three weeks later, the provincial government provided another five million to (the homes). We tend to believe it was us, the work we did with telephones,” Abbey boasts with a laugh.
André Fontaine, a community developer at the Centretown Community Health Centre, provides everything from transportation to photocopies for the teletree. He says the fight against cuts to home-care is catching on among seniors.
“We’re getting the interest of the rest of the province. This time around we’re getting the whole province involved,” he says.
Fontaine helps the seniors organize the teletree by contacting potential volunteer groups and gathering government telephone numbers.
He says people aren’t going to phone or write if they don’t understand the importance of the issue, so he also helps put together information packages, including a sample letter and phone message, for the volunteers.
Margaret Gardner has been recruiting volunteers through information meetings at her apartment building. She says seniors need to be more aware of what will happen when the General, Riverside hospitals, and possibly Montfort hospital, close.
“I feel that more seniors have to know about it (hospital restructuring) and learn about it, not just play bridge four times a week,” she says. “It’s just a case of getting them to do it. They say it’s a good idea, but then they just sit back.”
As a retired ministerial secretary, Gardner used to take the calls she’s now making as a volunteer. She says teletrees can be effective lobby tools.
“When a minister receives 6,000 calls, he’s going to think this is something that needs to change,” she says.
The teletree volunteer base is largely made up of members of various Centretown senior’s groups, such as the No Name Senior’s Action Network, the Superannuated Teachers and the Good Companions.
The teletree is part of a growing trend in senior advocacy, says Abbey.