City council to decide whether paramedic laundry drifts south

The city's paramedic services want to send their laundry down south, but Sudbury city council won't let that happen just yet.

At Tuesday'scity council meeting, the city's emergency services proposed to stop their contract with Sudbury Hospital Services (SHS). They want to start a three-year contract with Mohawk Shared Services in Hamilton, ONthe same company that'sreplacing SHS with at Health Sciences North.

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Joseph Nicholls, deputy chief of emergency services, says the department has known about this proposal for six to eight weeks. He says this switch would be efficient because all laundry that goes through the hospital paramedic or not goes to the same place.

"The laundry is being dropped off across the hospital system into hundreds of hampers, getting mixed in with hospital laundry," says Nicholls.

"So our laundry, regardless of what provider we use here in Sudbury, will go down south because it's intertwined with the hospital's laundry."

Two companies, too complicated

Nicholls says the department did look at local options, including keeping SHS on, but it wouldn't work with the way the hospital is set up.

"We have no way to be in a hospital of that size in a 24/7 basis and make sure laundry is going into different hampers," says Nicholls. "If we were to try and do that, we would have to likely hire staff, to put them in the hospital and likely chase laundry on our behalf. And that would make it a very cost-prohibitive issue for us."

'We're trying to save jobs'

Several councillors voiced opposing opinions. Coun. Gerry Montpellier says he couldn't believe the proposal even came up.

"I can't get behind this at all. We're trying to save jobs," Montpellier says.

"Surely, Jesus, somebody in Sudbury can do this.I'm not a laundry expert here, but there's got to be other options."

City didn't do 'due diligence'

Nicholls also mentioned SHS told his department that they would have to increase their prices by 25 per cent because they've lost the hospital's business. And that's just not a cost the department can afford, according to Nicholls.

But Coun. Joscelyne Landry-Altmannsays the department should have explored more options. Nicholls says they only approached SHS about the issue, not other local businesses.

"I find that we didn't do our due diligence. We did not offer this for bidding, for tender, for an RFP," says Landry-Altmann."We talk about an unemployment rate, yet here we are sending work down to Hamilton."

Council voted to defer their decision until next week's meeting.