AODA Alliance
Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance
United for a Barrier-Free Society for All People with Disabilities Web: www.aodaalliance.org Email: aodafeedback@gmail.com Twitter: @aodaalliance Facebook: www.facebook.com/aodaalliance/
February 25, 2021
To: The Hon. Christine Elliott, Minister of Health
Via email: Christine.elliott@ontario.ca
Ministry of Health
5th Floor
777 Bay St.
Toronto, ON M7A 2J3
Dear Minister,
Re: Ontario’s Plan for Medical Triage of Life-Saving Critical Care in the Event Hospitals Cannot Handle All COVID-19 Cases
We write to alert you to yet more serious concerns about the Ontario plan for critical care triage in the event that Ontario hospitals get overloaded and start to ration or triage life-saving critical care. With this letter, we enclose a new report that the AODA Alliance has prepared which independently reviews those plans. It identifies several serious new problems with the Ontario critical care triage plan, beyond those which we have earlier alerted you to in our unanswered letters, those being our September 25, 2020 letter, our November 2, 2020 letter, our November 9, 2020 letter, our December 7, 2020 letter, our December 15, 2020 letter, our December 17, 2020 letter and our January 18, 2021 letter.
We urge the Ford Government to immediately act to eliminate from Ontario’s critical care triage plan the problems we have identified up to now, and in this new report. Minister, this is an issue of life-and-death for Ontario’s most vulnerable people. It deserves a response from you.
For example, this new report reveals that a seriously troubling and disability-discriminatory online “Short Term Mortality Risk Calculator” has been created for triage doctors to use to calculate whether a patient should be refused life-saving critical care they need and want, if critical care triage must take place. It is available at www.stmrcalculator.ca It should immediately be shut down.
This new report also reveals that instructions may have been given or may be given to Ontario emergency services and EMTs on the possibility of not starting critical care supports in some situations for an emergency patient who needs and wants them, before reaching the hospital, if critical care triage has been directed for Ontario. This would be done so that hospitals don’t feel obligated to continue giving that patient critical care. We ask you to let us know if any such instructions have been given or have been designed or contemplated, by whom and to whom, with and with what authority? If so, we ask you to give us a copy of those instructions, past or present, and any draft instructions being considered.
This new report also shows that the troubling legal defence strategy that has been crafted to defend Ontario’s critical care triage plan is fatally flawed. It shows as well that this plan goes even further to in effect make each critical care triage physician a law unto themselves, dressed up as precise and objective medical science. We ask you to rescind that plan, and to ensure that any critical care triage plan or protocol is free of constitutional and human rights violations.
There has been no public announcement that critical care triage is already occurring in Ontario. To the contrary, The Government has said that it has not been occurring. Yet this report reveals that such triage in some form may already in effect be taking place in Ontario, according to a January 23, 2021 statement by one of the senior physicians involved in Ontario’s critical care triage planning. We ask you to immediately look into this, make all the relevant information public, and take steps to ensure that critical care triage does not occur until and unless it is free of these serious problems.
Please end your Government’s protracted secrecy in the area of critical care triage. This report reveals that senior physicians whom The Government has entrusted in this area have emphasized the importance of openness and transparency. For example, please make public now and provide us with the Bioethics Table’s secret January 12, 2021 report on critical care triage to The Government.
Minister, please now meet with us. Have your Ministry officials, responsible in this area, meet with us. Do not simply slough us off on the Bioethics Table. It is not the body making the decisions here. Moreover, the Bioethics Table has unwisely rejected some key parts of our input without explanation, without justification and without passing along the advice on this topic that it evidently opted to reject or disregard.
Please stay safe.
David Lepofsky CM, O. Ont
Chair Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance
CC:
Premier Doug Ford premier@ontario.ca
Helen Angus, Deputy Minister of Health helen.angus@ontario.ca
Raymond Cho, Minister of Seniors and Accessibility Raymond.cho@ontario.ca
Denise Cole, Deputy Minister for Seniors and Accessibility Denise.Cole@ontario.ca
Mary Bartolomucci, Assistant Deputy Minister for the Accessibility Directorate, Mary.Bartolomucci@ontario.ca
Todd Smith, Minister of Children, Community and Social Services todd.smithco@pc.ola.org
Janet Menard, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services Janet.Menard@ontario.ca
Ena Chadha, Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission cco@ohrc.on.ca