Response to Toronto Sun article

Letter to the Editor, September 1, 2001

Sue-Ann Levy’s article “Your city tax dollars at work” (August 26, 2001) is an astonishing distortion of facts.

Ms. Levy is apparently unable to even correctly identify the organizations she sets out to belittle. She hopelessly confuses two completely separate groups, Women Working with Immigrant Women, and the Immigrant Women’s Health Centre, and then writes about their funding as if they were one and the same organization. The fact that they both provide services for immigrant women was apparently enough to trigger Ms. Levy’s ill-informed hostility.

Ms. Levy claims that when she visited the Immigrant Women’s Health Centre, she found herself sitting in an empty waiting room. It is unfortunate that she didn’t enquire about what was happening in the other rooms during that time, because on that day between ll am and 2 pm, 24 patients were seen by the physician and the medical resident on duty and received counselling by the other staff.

As a physician who works at the Centre and has worked in many health care settings including 20 years in private practice, I can attest to the wonderful service that the Health Centre offers immigrant women who are made comfortable culturally and linguistically and receive high quality care in the area mainly of reproductive health matters. It is unfortunate that the Centre’s work should have been subjected to such poor quality reporting.

Dr. Miriam Garfinkle