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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2007-02-08, Page 15PAGE 16. THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2007. As mentioned in my last column, I’m a soccer fan. But this column only starts with soccer, this week it isn’t about the beautiful game. The difficulty of finding decent soccer coverage in North American newspapers has driven me to pick up a British newspaper on my way home every Tuesday to get caught up. This week, before I flipped to the back section, a massive headline caught my attention: “NHS chiefs tell nurses to work for no pay”. Now, no one likes to work for free, so this struck me as a news item worthy of my attention. Having very recently been a student in the overpopulated market of Toronto, I know about working for free. It’s called an internship. Sold as invaluable experience and paid for in credits rather than dollars, the idea of working for free is not an appealing one when you’re on the working side of the negotiation. Anyway, after reading on, I learned that the NHS (National Health Service) in Britain is in a massive financial hole and they have asked several ‘favours’ of their workers to help avoid significant job losses. Option one: work for free for one day. Option two: take six months of unpaid vacation. Option three: Voluntary redundancy (read: quit). Or option four: Defer five days of paid vacation until next year. Now, through sitting in on council meetings and my own dealings with doctors, I knew Canadian health care was going through a rough patch financially, but nothing like this. Admittedly, I don’t know all the ins and outs of the health system in Canada, let alone that of Britain, but I do know about priority. As reported by me in The Citizen, Huron East is taking steps to ensure quality health care in the area, because they are committing to the project. They are making health care a priority. It is my opinion that if an organization ever found itself in such dire straits that it needed to make such a request, shouldn’t the government step in to ensure that such a request never be made in the first place? Having several friends who are nurses, when I went to them for comment, they were not really that surprised. Nursing has long been an underappreciated profession they said, so such a request is just another slap in the face to the collective nursing body. Unfortunately, with professions that cater to the health and well- being of others, quitting absolutely is often impossible and it becomes a moral question. These issues are not new to me. My father is a recent retiree of the Metro Toronto Police Force. He retired with 33 years of service. When the officers went on strike, they wore baseball hats, because they clearly couldn’t go off the job. I think the same estimation is being made of nurses in Britain, that they won’t revolt against this request because the stakes are too high. The underappreciation of these and many other professions is nothing new, this is just a milestone in how far high-ups expect those down in the trenches to go to cover financial folly and poor decisions that none of them personally made. Like I said, to me it is a matter of priority. If a government really thinks its country needs something, they find the money to get it. If I go back to soccer, this is the equivalent of a team asking the public to pay more for tickets to pay a brand new expensive striker’s salary. Which I guess they do. Like I said, it’s not new, but mistakes wrapped in tradition doesn’t make it acceptable. Campaign attacks youth gambling Young people have the highest rate of problem gambling at 6.9 per cent of the population. This is a fact that is not up for dispute says Dr. Jon Kelly, CEO of the Responsible Gambling Council (RGC). With this fact staring them in the face, the RGC developed the Friends4Friends campaign in 2005 and have brought it back in late 2006. The comprehensive campaign was borne out of the idea that people aged 18-24 with a gambling problem are more apt to listen to their friends. The campaign, consisting of posters, TV ads and a theatre ad all based out of an interactive website, is aimed at the friends of those in trouble with gambling. Points of concern in the world of youth gambling in recent years are the soaring popularity of poker in mainstream culture as well as the accessibility of online gambling. “[The RGC] found out that in Ontario, about 20 per cent [of the population] play poker for money at least once a year. Now, that’s just once a year. But if you look at the people who do play poker, it’s one third in young adults,” said Kelly, citing a study done earlier in 2006. “Whereas it’s one in 20 in the general population, it’s one in three in young people. When we asked them how often they play, we found out that 11 per cent are playing every day.” These findings are just the tip of the iceberg with increases happening in many areas. Almost half of the youth age group is playing poker more often than they were two years ago. In addition to that, people aged 18-24 gambling on-line has increased from 1.4 per cent in 2001 to 5.5 per cent in 2005, a significant jump. “After we did our research, it was obvious that this youth group were the people we should be talking to for several reasons,” Kelly said. “We’re in the problem gambling prevention business. That’s the focus of our organization. When you’re in the prevention business, you want to get to young people anyway, because you want to make sure these people have protective information throughout their lives, not just when they’re young. But then when you realize that these people can get themselves into real gambling problems very early, we feel an urgency.” The increase that Kelly references is something that has been seen all over. Gail Huber of Huron Addiction Services agrees, saying that there’s been an increase in youth activity. “We’re seeing more people aged 18-24 than we’ve seen in years. But is my caseload full of youth? I can’t say that it is, but I can say there has been a gradual increase of youth gambling,” Huber said. “I think for one thing that it’s more accessible to youth these days. There are more opportunities to gamble and you don’t have to go far to gamble.” Huber also agrees that a way to a youth’s heart is through their friends, which is at the core of the RGC’s new campaign. “I do find that whether it’s adults or youths, people are more apt to talk about a friend’s gambling problem than their own. They can see friends gambling, they can talk about it,” Huber said. “Youth are pretty up front once you get them talking about it, but if you’re in a presentation, it’s not uncommon, for adults even, to talk about this friend they have, and youth will do that too. But depending on the situation and how safe the situation is for them, they will talk about their own gambling.” This is the fuel of the campaign’s fire, to get to those who know someone who could benefit from this information, people who might not be ready to confront their problem on their own. “We hear this all the time, that somebody knows somebody, a friend of a friend and does my friend have a problem? If he does have a problem, what can I say about it? I don’t want to lose him. You know how important friends are,” Kelly said. “We wanted to help people understand the signs of a gambling problem. Then, if you understand, what can you do about it? How can you talk about it? Where else can you get help? Things like that.” The RGC has had youth programs before, but Kelly says this is the first campaign of its kind in Ontario. “Why we’re doing an advertising campaign is to get information in the heads of this age group because they didn’t have any before. There hadn’t been any advertising campaigns in Ontario before this one. This was a first,” Kelly said. “We had programs in the colleges and universities and in the high schools. But if you go to a high school with a play, your information is mostly confined to the people in the seats. However, this campaign gives us a much better reach.” While this campaign is the first of its kind in Ontario with respect to gambling, Kelly says that this strategy of going to the people close to those in need is nothing new. “If you want to do preventionprograms, you should speak tospouses and friends and kids. Thegambler who has a significant problem is the least likely to hear a message, but a spouse or a kid...” Kelly said. “This kind of strategy has been used for smoking, alcohol and in many other areas and basically the assumption is that the person is lost and the people around them are much more likely to recognize their problems and say something about it, but it’s not risk free.” Kelly stresses that many things can go wrong during a confrontation about an issue like problem gambling, and that is where Friends4Friends comes in. “You could do it wrong and make it worse or you could lose a friend. Many things can go wrong when you raise these types of personal issues and we wanted to help people to be more confident when they talked about it.” This reach extension that Kelly boasts didn’t come cheap, but the RGC received significant funding from the government for this project and gave them free reign on the content. “The campaign was funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health promotion and the campaign is essentially a $2 million campaign,” Kelly says. “So the Ministry of Health promotion paid for that, and to their credit, they let us do it. They had no direct involvement in the messaging or things like that.” Kelly says that Friends4Friends is far from a quick fix and that planting the seed of hope in people is the business they’re in. “We want to get people to see it, we want to make sure that people understand that if you have a gambling problem, or if you think you know someone with a gambling problem that there is help available for you and for that person,” Kelly said in closing. “We want people to use the website. Last year we had 15,000 people come to the website and that’s quite a substantial number, so if we could do that again, I think that would be an excellent outcome. It’s about awareness and sometimes you just plant seeds in people’s heads. They see something and they don’t think about it. They see an ad in a bus and they remember it two years later. It gives people some inkling about what they can do.” Friends: An ace up your sleeve With youth gambling on the rise, the Responsible Gambling Council launched the Friends4Friends campaign which educates friends on how to confront those close to them who have a gambling problem. This campaign includes television ads, posters, a theatrical ad and an interactive website. (Courtesy photo) By Shawn LoughlinThe Citizen Shawn Loughlin SShhaawwnn’’ss SSeennssee When it comes to health care, things are tough all over