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More services needed outside the Perimeter

The Brandon Sun - 7/27/2020

Given Winnipeg’s status as Manitoba’s most populous urban centre — one carrying more than half the province’s population — it makes perfect sense it would receive the lion’s share of services.

Claims of “perimeteritis” are often overstated, but as it relates to last week’s announcement of $1.1 million worth of funding to expand the eating disorders program at Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre and the creation of a safe nutrition clinic, we feel vindicated in making this assertion.

The program’s expansion in Winnipeg, where they already have five inpatient beds and an interdisciplinary team of people with expertise in anorexia, bulimia and disordered eating, comes at a time when Brandon has no provincially funded treatment option for eating disorders.

While Prairie Mountain Health offers mental health and dietitian services in Westman, anyone in need of additional services is directed to either the Winnipeg program or the Brandon-based Westwind Counselling and Eating Disorder Recovery Centre, a private care facility that costs more than $20,000 for three months of inpatient treatment.

Neither the health region nor Health Minister Cameron Friesen adequately addressed this local shortcoming when asked about it last week, choosing instead to praise the province as though they were being held as hostages.

“This is a significant step in the treatment and care of individuals with eating disorders in Manitoba. Health Sciences Centre is the provincial hospital, and all Manitobans, including those in the Westman region, will benefit from the announcement,” Friesen said.

A phone call with the health minister’s office was requested, as well as the opportunity to ask some followup questions over email. The office declined, saying they have nothing to add to the statement.

In an emailed statement — their preferred means of correspondence — Prairie Mountain Health opted against local health services advocacy in favour of kissing the province’s boot: “Prairie Mountain Health was very pleased to hear today’s announcement by Minister Friesen of the investment of $1.1 million which will be directed to increasing inpatient and outpatient eating disorders program capacity and access in the province.”

The bolstering and further centralization of health services in Winnipeg is good news for Westman, apparently. It’ll be interesting to see where Prairie Mountain Health stands on the centralization of health regions, such as what happened in Saskatchewan, which is now served by one central Saskatchewan Health Authority. While pushing for a similar model would be the antithesis of what we’d want to see or advocate for, Prairie Mountain Health doesn’t make a strong case for themselves in the carefully curated and limited written correspondence bereft of local advocacy they chose to share with media on the eating disorders program.

Of those who use the Health Sciences Centre’s eating disorders programming, 23 per cent had mailing addresses outside of Winnipeg. This alone is enough to raise red flags, since 45 per cent of the province lives outside of Winnipeg, according to the 2016 census, which makes for quite the discrepancy. According to these numbers, those living in rural areas are less likely to receive the same eating disorders programming those in Winnipeg benefit from, and there’s no reason we can think of to explain this other than proximity to services.

It’s difficult to say where the province stands on centralization, with the daily news cycle pointing to both sides of the equation. On the positive side, last week saw the province announce funding for a Keystone Centre sustainability study, inject $160,000 into the local Citizens on Patrol and Crime Stoppers programs as well as celebrate the one-year anniversary of Westman’s drug treatment court.

Hopefully, the drug treatment court is only the beginning and we get a mental health court, which is already offered in Winnipeg, soon. While we can never expect to have the same level of services available locally as those in Winnipeg benefit from, your local politicians, health region and other representatives in Winnipeg would be remiss in their duties if they didn’t advocate for something as close as possible.