By Doug Draper
Two citizens in south Niagara have received awards from an Ontario-wide coalition of health-care advocates for their role in fighting for fair and accessible hospital services for their communities.
Port Colborne health care activist Pat Schofield addresss a public meeting on cuts to hospital services earlier this year. Photo by Doug Draper
Pat Schofield, a Port Colborne resident and leader of the People’s Health Care Coalition in that community, and Sue Salzer, a Fort Erie resident and leader of what has come to be known across the region as the Yellow Shirt Brigade, were recently presented with Dan Benedict Awards at the Ontario Health Coalition’s annual conference in Toronto.
The awards, named after the late Daniel Benedict, an Order of Canada recipient and Canadian Auto Workers representative who was a champion of universal health care, recognize the continued efforts by Schofield and Salzer to lobby governments and hospital administrators for quality hospital services across the Niagara region. Natalie Mehra, director of the Ontario Health Coalition, told Niagara At Large her citizen-based organization chose Schofield and Salzer for the awards because “they have exhibited an extraordinary commitment to their communities and we wanted to celebrate and acknowledge this. They have put in endless hours. They have worried, burned up the phone lines, organized their communities, and through it all, have shown exemplary leadership. …
“We believe that public services like hospitals are just that – public,” added Mehra. “They rely on an active and engaged community to hold them to account, to support them, to keep them viable, and to meet the needs of people who perhaps cannot speak for themselves. That is why the Health Coalition tries to recognize people like Sue and Pat who really understand the ideas of public service and community.
Over the past year and a half in particular, Schofield and Salzer have organized thousands of their fellow citizens in campaigns to save emergency and other services at the Port Colborne General Hospital and Douglas Memorial Hospital in Fort Erie. The emergency rooms in both hospitals were recently converted to urgent care centres by the Niagara Health System, a body created by the province nine years ago to amalgamate hospital services across the region. But the women are still waging campaigns for fair access to full hospital services for residents living in central and southern parts of the region.
Some of you may have seen Schofield and Salzer over the past year, along with numerous others wearing bright yellow t-shirts with a big black ‘NO’ branded on them – as in ‘no cuts to our hospitals’, at area council meetings and rallies over the past year. This past spring, they were in west St. Catharines staging a picket while the Niagara Health System was hosting groundbreaking ceremonies on old farmland nearby for possibly the only new hospital complex for which the region will receive provincial funding for decades to come. The NHS hired about a dozen regional police officers, some of them mounted on horseback, to keep an eye on Schofield, Salzer and handful of other protesters (most of them seniors) while the ceremonies were in progress.
Schofield was among the first voices in Niagara’s south end to argue that the new hospital – expected to cost more than a billion dollars – should be built on a more central site in the region so all communities, including Port Colborne, Fort Erie, Wainfleet and others have more equal access to it. Several people from the south end have told this reporter they would not be as concerned about the downsizing of existing community hospitals if the new hospital complex was being built somewhere closer to the centre of the region.
Here are excerpts of the words Pat Schofield and Sue Salzer shared with Niagara At Large after receiving their awards; “Of course it was an honour and a pleasant surprise to receive the awards from the Ontario Health Coalition on behalf of all the citizens of south Niagara, who are fighting for timely and equitable access to hospital and health care services. We are certainly not there yet, but we went to Queen’s Park (in late October) and met the new health minister Deb Matthews, and she seems very receptive to hearing from us. So we are hopeful that unlike her predecessors (David Caplan), she will realize that the way the NHS is implementing the HIP (its ‘Hospital Improvement Plan’), it will not provide the citizens of south Niagara with appropriate and life-saving services, and that necessary adjustments will have to be made. Our People’s Healthcare Coalition and Sue Salzer of the Yellow Shirt Brigade work really well together and it was very deserving for her to be an award recipient as she is a tireless fighter for the people.”
- Pat Schofield
“The usual platitudes will not cover how I really feel about this recognition. It is a true honor to be recognized for a commitment made to retain first-class Health Care for the residents of Fort Erie. It also belongs to every Yellow Shirt who traveled to endless meetings and Queens Park, and to everyone who wrote letters, carried picket signs and spent many hours emailing, and making tapes and commercials.
Fort Erie health care activist wearing the yellow shirt that has become a symbol for "no hospital cuts" for thousands of her fellow citizens across the region. Photo by Doug Draper
But it is also an award that is bittersweet because we lost our ORs (operating rooms) our ERs (emergency rooms) and our active medical beds. … In effect, our hospital as we knew it.
During the past months, as part of our plea for a moratorium we issued many warnings to both the NHS and the LHIN Board that our closures would result in dire circumstances, Predictions were made of operating room delays, additional wait-times in Emergency Rooms, avoidable deaths and serious overload potential in the coming flu pandemic. It gives me little satisfaction to report that every one of these predictions has now proved correct.
Am I proud of the award and recognition for our efforts? Yes. But of course I wish for a better outcome. With all the existing problems in the NHS system, our work has just begun. Until they are willing to re -evaluate the wisdom of continuing to implement the HIP plan, more crises in the system can be expected.
- Sue Salzer
Good Job – Keep it coming