(April 25, 2018)<\/p>\n
By: Sanjay Maru, CBC News<\/p>\n
People who have suffered a cardiac incident\u00a0have a new place to receive treatment\u00a0? but it will come at a cost.<\/p>\n
The Windsor-Essex Rehabilitation & Wellness Centre was unveiled Wednesday during a grand opening. The program was first established as a pilot last year and is now being implemented as a permanent treatment option for cardiac patients in Windsor-Essex County.<\/p>\n
Funding for the new clinic will be privatized, meaning patients will have to pay for care through insurance or out-of-pocket.<\/p>\n
Cardiologist Roland Mikhail said the private clinic will give patients a faster “portal of entry” into accessing rehabilitation.<\/p>\n
“While people wait for the opening to come up in the publicly-funded\u00a0program, we have the opportunity to get them right away into rehab.”<\/p>\n
According to Windsor Cardiac Care, more than 1,000 patients in Windsor-Essex County experience a cardiac event annually\u00a0and only 600 can access a cardiac rehabilitation program.<\/p>\n
“People have waited anywhere from three to six months to engage in the public program,” said Mikhail.<\/p>\n
A longstanding debate<\/strong><\/p>\n The subject of private clinics have remained at the forefront of controversy.<\/p>\n During a proposal for a private eye care centre in west Newfoundland, The Canadian\u00a0Health Coalition<\/strong>\u00a0said private practices “can prey on vulnerable patients, who might not know about the rules and their rights.”<\/p>\n Richard Maling, a patient of the cardiac rehabilitation program, said private\u00a0services speed up the process of receiving care.<\/p>\n “I met with Dr. Mikhail and he offered this wellness program which I started in January. So although there is another program available, there is months and months to wait, and I wasn’t one of those people that felt comfortable doing that,” he said, adding the program started just six weeks after his initial cardiac incident.<\/p>\n Maling said it would have taken him six months to receive care in the public system.<\/p>\n The idea to bring a private\u00a0clinic to Windsor came from cardiologist Dhssraj Singh. He originally worked in the United States and noticed a lack of private health care clinics in Windsor.<\/p>\n “In America, cardiovascular care is practiced very differently … You see a patient [in Windsor] three months after a heart attack and you ask, ‘how’s cardiac rehab going?’ And they say, ‘I haven’t heard from them yet.’ … But it’s not them twiddling their thumbs. Everyone’s just busy in a stretched system.”<\/p>\n