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