Timmins and District Hospital will begin the process of finding a partner organization to manage its sleep clinic.
The hospital last week was in the final stages of developing a request for proposals (RFP) for the management of the six-bed sleep lab.
Bryan Bennetts, the hospital’s chief financial officer, said the goal is to release the RFP this week and then review and evaluate the responses by mid-February.
“The purpose of the RFP is to seek a proponent interested in partnering with the hospital to continue sleep lab clinic services in Timmins,” Bennetts wrote in an emailed statement to The Daily Press. “In the meantime, the TADH sleep lab clinic continues to operate and accept physician referrals for tests and follow-up. All efforts will be made to have a seamless transition in order to avoid any interruptions in service or increased wait times.”
The future of the clinic became cloudy late last year after The Daily Press revealed the hospital had requested authorization from the North East Local Health Integration Network to shut down the sleep lab as a cost-cutting measure.
Since then, the North East LHIN and the hospital have been working together to come up with a solution that would keep the clinic open.
MPP Gilles Bisson (NDP – Timmins-James Bay) said the Ontario Ministry of Health appears to have endorsed a move to “privatize” the sleep lab services at the hospital.
“It’s unfortunate because it doesn’t necessarily save you any money, and it doesn’t necessarily get you better service,” said Bisson.
“What they (the provincial government) should have done was adjust the budget of the hospital and that would have fixed the problem. Now they’re going to go through this entire RFP process in order to put in place a private service and who knows where that private service is going to lead us.”
A local family physician who has referred numerous patients to the sleep clinic over the years, said if the lab closed, it would be a “huge loss” because many people in the Timmins area who have sleep disorders “would go undiagnosed and untreated.”
Dr. George Freundlich, a family physician who is also the medical director at Bingham Memorial Hospital in Black River-Matheson, said there are numerous potential medical-related causes for fatigue.
“When somebody comes to my office complaining about feeling fatigued, we have to go through lots of questions and answers and then I start doing laboratory investigations, trying to figure out the underlying cause.”
Freundlich said in many cases, physicians will diagnose an internal medical problem that is contributing to this sense of unrelenting fatigue.
However, in instances where he cannot identify the cause, Freundlich said he will refer the patient to the sleep lab at Timmins’ hospital.
“These patients are brought into Timmins for an overnight study … and some of them have what we know as sleep apnea,” Freundlich explained. “They don’t breathe regular during their sleep; there are gaps and breaks when they are asleep, so the brain doesn’t get enough oxygen as it should.
“The good news is they can not only be diagnosed … they can be treated very effectively.”
If ultimately a decision is made to close the sleep clinic as a cost-cutting measure, Freundlich is concerned residents in Timmins and surrounding communities will simply not bother going out of town, travelling four hours to get checked out.
“If it was in Timmins, in all likelihood, they would attend. If it’s somewhere else, they would need to take time off from work, they would miss at least one day of work, if not two, going down, staying overnight, not sleeping properly, requiring someone to drive them back and forth, makes it very difficult and expensive.”
Freundlich said this is not just a matter of individual’s health, but public safety.
“This is also very important for the safety on the road because some people without realizing it are overtired and they ideally shouldn’t be driving. So by diagnosing large numbers of people, we are actually keeping the roads safer. There are also fewer work-related accidents due to fatigue. People overtired, they make mistakes, and that can result in work-related injuries which could have been prevented.”
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