KINGSTON — Immigration Services and the Kingston Community Health Centres are struggling to get adequate and timely health care to refugees being resettled in Kingston by the federal government.

Kingston is one of the designated welcoming cities for government-sponsored refugees arriving in Canada. There is a multi-year agreement with a few local community agencies that do the actual work of resettling those people.

The problem is that the budget for this agreement is based on the expectation of 100 new refugees being brought to Kingston every year, but last year the government sent 175 to Kingston.

The consequence of having so many more people than expected is being felt most keenly by Kingston Community Health Centres, which has been struggling to meet the medical needs of refugees.

“The issue is: How does a city of our size serve the health needs of those people who often have higher needs than your average Canadian,” Steve Kirby, community connections facilitator for KCHC, said.

The situation has become serious enough that representatives from the different community agencies involved with refugee resettlement met with administrators from the City of Kingston, including CAO Lanie Hurdle, on Tuesday morning. They weren’t necessarily asking for money, just imploring the city to do whatever is in its power to help address the situation.

For the city, however, the meeting was about gathering information.

“The city attended the meeting for information and discussion as we are involved with a family physician study, approved by council,” Hurdle said in a statement after the city was asked for comment.

The study she refers to was ordered by council in early December with the aim of understanding the extent of the family doctor shortage in Kingston, and to develop a family physician supply plan.

It appears that the refugee situation will be considered when drafting that plan. According to Kirby, city administrators asked the KCHC to look into what other municipalities are doing to help support medical services for refugees and then to report back.

What is needed to solve the problem is funding to pay for medical expenses, such as hiring doctors to come in and see the refugees regularly. Currently, the agreement with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada does not include money for that specific purpose.

“We have all the infrastructure we need to serve these folks here, but it’s about getting enough money to pay for an extra doctor to do this. But it’s hard to know what level of government to go to; we know the city is not in the health-care business,” Kirby said.

In an emailed response to questions from the Whig-Standard, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada confirmed that while it does provide funding to the KCHC to deliver services to immigrants and refugees, that agreement does not include medical services.

The federal government does pay for refugees’ medical treatment, but only for three months after they arrive in Canada. After that, they begin using the provincial health-care system.

“Refugees resettled to Canada from overseas have permanent resident status upon arrival in Canada, and as such, have the right to access most of the social benefits that Canadian citizens receive, including provincial health-care coverage,” Remi Lariviere, a ministry spokesperson, said.

So recently arrived refugees are in the same boat as many other residents of Kingston without access to a family doctor. Kirby said he and his colleagues are all painfully aware that the assistance they need could be seen as a form of special treatment for refugees.

“It’s hard to put out a call for special funding when some people might see it as refugees getting special care,” he admitted. “But they are not getting preferential treatment; they are getting needed treatment. Canada has also committed to the UN to bring these people in.”

People being sent to Kingston as refugees have often fled conflict and may have been waiting in camps or in poor conditions for years before coming to Canada. The KCHC has made as much use of its limited resources and the available medical services in the city as it can to meet refugees’ unique needs, but it is quite inadequate.

“We have a walk-in clinic (at the KCHC building) on Friday mornings, and since Immigration Services is here as well, we referred them to our own walk-in clinic,” Kirby said. “They were not able to serve all the needs because it was being added to the already huge caseload we have here.

“We had some refugees coming back every Friday for like eight weeks in a row.”

Ideally, KCHC would not only like to be able to pay doctors to come in and look after the refugees, it would also ike to acquire professional translation services for those who can’t speak fluent English.

So far, they have depended on a call-in translation service that charges by the minute, but a face-to-face interpreter would be better, and having translators trained specifically for medical situations would be best of all.

The federal government’s response to the Whig-Standard did not address the issue of funding for medical translation services or why so many more refugees than anticipated are being sent to the city without an accompanying increase in funding.

ahale@postmedia.com

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