Even with extra funding, community health and resource centres in Ottawa were struggling to provide patients with transportation alternatives in a city rocked by the transit strike.
The City of Ottawa passed a resolution on Jan. 21 – about one week before the Jan. 29 end of the strike – that provided community health centres with $500,000 to cover costs related to the disruption in bus service.
It’s expected to take weeks before the transit system is fully operational.
Most of the centres use taxi chits to help their patients, and they can take money from the funds to cover these costs.
Some centres will receive more funding than others, depending on the programs they offer and the kind of community they serve. Centres with patients who rely more heavily on public transit will require more funds.
Eugene Williams, health promotion coordinator at Somerset West Community Health Centre, says that while the funding has made a difference in terms of being able to provide taxi chits, the centre is “barely coping.”
“The funding is only a band-aid,” says Williams. “It helps but it won’t solve the problem.”
SWCHC implemented a transportation helpline in mid-January so that people in the area could call to receive help getting where they needed to go. Williams says the number of calls was “growing exponentially” during the final weeks of January.
Both Centretown Community Health Centre and SWCHC have had to change the way they do business in terms of staffing. Lately, they have both been redeploying staff.
SWCHC is giving additional hours to some workers to help support services such as the transportation helpline.
At CCHC, executive director Simone Thibault says the centre is currently hiring more staff because they can’t support their organization with their existing human resources.
Along with these problems was the question of where the transportation for patients would actually come from. A lot of the funding goes towards taxi chits, but the wait for taxis can be long.
“It’s hard to address transportation without transit,” says Thibault. “We give the taxi chits, but we’ve had to be more creative in the ways we provide transportation.”
Williams said the Somerset West centre was working on organizing a shuttle bus service to transport patients to the grocery store.
There was already a shuttle bus in place for seniors, and the number of clients doubled over the course of the strike, he said.
Thibault also noted a steady increase in clients. She said the first few days after they learned of the $500,000 infusion, calls for help increased by up to 50 per cent.
“The need and the demand is enormous,” she said, describing how people were “at the end of their rope.”
On Jan. 9, the city provided the health centres with $200,000 in emergency funding, which was gone in less than two weeks.
Thibault said she didn’t expect the new funding to last very long either.
“So far, the requests for support we’re making, we’re getting – but it’s a huge demand on our non-profit organizations,” she says.
Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes said she recognized the toll the strike took on the community.
“I think this strike is a tragedy, especially for people in Centretown such as the elderly, or disabled people.”