by Carl BR Johnson
June 7, 2013
Photo by Carl BR Johnson — John Cottam visits his brother in the Dawson Creek hospital.
Patients in Dawson Creek must pay four times as much to watch television while in the hospital than patients in Fort St. John.
“I’m just sick of all these corporations making money off the poor people or the sick people,” said John Cottam, who visits his brother Oliver at the hospital on a regular basis.
“If you get a long-term patient in there, that’s a lot of money.”
The televisions available to patients at the Dawson Creek and District Hospital are maintained by the Hospitality Network, according to Northern Health. According to the health authority. The current daily rate is $11.20 for patients.
The same service only costs $2.80 in Fort St. John, according to Northern Health. The Fort St. John Hospital maintains the televisions themselves.
To add insult to injury, the quality of the televisions in Dawson Creek is “much lower” than those in the brand new facility that has been built in Fort St. John, according to Cottam.
Coming up to its one year anniversary, the hospital has new equipment, including wide screen televisions.
However any price is too much for Cottam, who believes that patients should not have to pay for such a minor luxury.
“It should be free,” he said.
However, the rates are not going down anytime soon. Serge LaFleur, chief operating officer of the Hospitality Network, said the organization had no plans to lower the cost to patients. He added that their rates are determined by “the level of investment required by the level of service needed as well as how much money is being returned to the hospital through the service.”
Jaret Clay, health services administrator for the Dawson Creek hospital, said he has no say in the rates of the TV service at the hospital.
“As the administrator of the hospital, I don’t hold the television service contract with Hospitality Network,” said Clay. However, Northern Health said that they did not contract the organization either.
Four years ago, the cost to patients was only “five dollars for the first day and a dollar a day after that,” according to Eunice Dilworth, president of the the Dawson Creek and District Auxiliary, the organization which provided maintained televisions before the Hospitality Network took over.
She said the membership numbers started to dwindle and the auxiliary couldn’t maintain the televisions at the hospital any longer, and so they passed the responsibility over to that organization.
Their hope was, that another company could do a better job than the Auxiliary could, citing the ultimate goal was the care and satisfaction of the patients.
“This company that came in to take over the hospital television system was supposed to fix the whole network, but they didn’t,” said Dilworth.
She knows that patients are not happy with the television service which does not provide the kind of satisfaction the auxiliary hoped for.
“A lot of the time they can’t get the programs they want to,” she said.
Televisions may seem like an unnecessary luxury, but for many patients they provided much needed distraction from discomfort. According to researchers at the University of Siena, children who watch television while giving blood for a test reported less pain. It also appeared to improve their pain tolerance.
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