A local activism group is hoping to raise $30,000 as soon as possible to pay Pontiac’s six full-time medical imaging technicians to stay in their jobs for another year instead of leaving for higher paying positions elsewhere.

Citizens of the Pontiac has launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise $5,000 for each technician – an amount that would more than equalize the discrepancy between the $22,000 bonus the Quebec government offered to technician positions in Hull, Gatineau and Papineau, and the $18,000 bonus it offered to those in Maniwaki, Wakefield and Pontiac.

The group’s hope is that this additional $5,000 would be enough to convince five of the technicians who, according to their union (APTS), are on track to leave their positions in the Pontiac by Sept. 9, to stay in these positions for another year.

“I’ve heard that five out of six are going. That’s going to shut the hospital down. That’s going to turn into a doctor’s office or a CLSC, and that’s basically not the function of a hospital,” said Citizens of the Pontiac spokesperson Judith Spence, explaining the drive behind the fundraiser.

“We don’t want to lose people for four grand a piece.”

Spence and three other members – Myles Jones, Amanda Brewster, and Nikki Buechler – have formed what she calls a steering committee responsible for organizing the fundraiser and ensuring the money is managed according to group policies.

“You don’t get a lump sum ahead of time,” Spence said, explaining how the money would be distributed to the technicians if the desired sum is raised. “You work, and every month you get a stipend.”

Spence said if the province does decide to pay Pontiac technicians the $22,000, the money raised will be returned to the donors, with the exception of the small percentage claimed by GoFundMe.

“We’ve always had to fight for basics,” she said, emphasizing this campaign is in no way political. “This is just, ‘You’re my neighbour and I don’t want you to go.’”

Spence has spent many years in community organizing and activism. She worked as a representative for her nurses union, as well as the president of the Environmental Illness Society of Canada, which lobbied the federal government to recognize multiple chemical sensitivity, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue syndrome.

“Government people do pay attention when people are sharing their voice and getting attention,” Spence said. “They will pay attention. Will they change? I believe they will.”

This spring the union agreed for the Quebec government to offer $22,000 bonuses to imaging technician positions in Papineau, Hull and Gatineau hospitals in an attempt to keep technicians employed there from moving to higher-paying jobs in Ontario.

The union later agreed for those working in Maniwaki, Wakefield and Pontiac hospitals, originally excluded from these bonuses, to be offered $18,000 bonuses, in an effort to incentivize them to stay in their positions rather than seeking the higher bonuses in urban hospitals.

But last month, APTS said five of the six full-time technicians working in both the hospital in Shawville and the CLSC in Mansfield were still planning to leave their positions even though they had been offered bonuses.

The union said last week it is continuing to pressure the province to extend the higher bonuses to all technicians, but this has not happened yet.

By this newspaper went to print, the Citizens of the Pontiac GoFundMe campaign had raised $2,150. Those wishing to contribute can search ‘Keep our Radiology Technicians here with us in Shawville’ in Google to find the campaign page.

Not first community fundraiser for imaging services

Josey Bouchard, founder of local healthcare advocacy group Pontiac Voice, said she is frustrated the government’s management of the staffing shortage has pushed some in the Pontiac community to try to raise the bonus shortfall themselves.

“I find it amazing that they’re doing it, and appalling that they have to do that,” Bouchard said. I hope it relates to them that the community wants their services close by [ . . . ] It’s appalling that we have to go to this extreme, for the government to wake up.”

She noted this isn’t the first time residents of the region have organized themselves to raise money to support local radiology services, pointing to the $800,000 the community raised in the late 90s to purchase the hospital’s first CT scan.

At the time, Dr. Thomas O’Neill was president of the Pontiac Hospital Foundation, which was spearheading a plan to attract doctors to the region, and so he was very involved in the fundraising efforts.

“So we identified [purchasing a CT scan] as something that would be necessary to attract and keep doctors in the area,” Dr. O’Neill said.

“The initial goal was to raise $700,000 which we did in a remarkable period of two and a half years, and that was from one of the poorest communities in Quebec.”

He said while he saw that fundraising effort as, at its core, a community proving it was committed enough to its healthcare to raise the needed money, he sees the current fundraising effort underway in a slightly different light.

“When you’re looking at this GoFundMe, I really appreciate the people that are doing this, it’s coming from their heart [ . . . ], but the problem is the real attention needs to be focused on the political aspect because it’s unfair,” Dr. O’Neill said.

“It’s the country areas that produce the food, produce the hydro, produce everything. They should, at least, be entitled to basic medical care.”

Dr. O’Neill, who now works as a family doctor at the Lotus Clinic, has spent many decades working at the Pontiac Hospital, as chief of anesthesia and of the department of general medicine, as a doctor in the emergency room, and delivering babies in the now-dissolved obstetrics unit.

He said losing five of six technicians – those responsible for running the machines that produce images interpreted by radiologists – would effectively mean the gradual death of the most services offered at the hospital.

“If you lose your technicians, and the surgeons can’t do their jobs, and you can’t run the ICU, you get a cascading effect of the deterioration of the institution,” he said.

“You cannot run this hospital at the moment unless you have the diagnostic tools to do it. Part of those tools are having x-ray technicians who will actually run the equipment.”

*Update: Aug. 9, 2024 This article previously reported the technicians’ union, APTS, had signed a new deal with the province enabling medical imaging technicians to join the province’s ‘flying squad’ of healthcare workers. This was incorrect. The new agreement enabled other kinds of technicians to join the squad, but not imaging technicians. This article has been corrected to reflect this.