Niagara At Large

 By Doug Draper

If there are as many people across the region of Niagara, Ontario as I suspect there are who are concerned about the future of our hospital services, Welland’s Lion’s Club should be packed to the rafters this coming Tuesday, March 9, for a public hearing on the future of our hospitals.

The Welland hospital site is just one of the hospitals with services under stress thanks to the provincial government's 'hospital improvement plans'. Photo by Doug Draper

For years now, this reporter and columnist has been flooded with emails, phone calls and people just wandering up to me at a gathering in the community, expressing their upset over where the Niagara Health System and provincial government are going with our local hospital services.

‘What can we do’, many have asked me after one of I can’t remember how many columns I’ve written over the past six or more year on the growing mismanagement of our hospital services. ‘Where can we go to complain?’

Well, here is one answer for you. Make every effort to drop whatever else you think you have to do this coming Tuesday, March 9 and show up sometime between 3 and 6:30 p.m. at a public hearing being held on our hospital services by the not-for-profit, Toronto-based citizens organization, the Ontario Health Coalition.

Yes, I know. There will be some out there who say, just as former McGuinty Liberal health minister David Caplan did last spring when the Ontario Health Coalition joined more than a thousand Niagara residents at a rally for hospital services at Queen’s Park, that this coalition is just a bunch of left wingers from the labour movement or NDP flaks, or whatever.

It was a cheap and condescending way for the McGuinty government to dismiss the concerns of so many Niagara residents who gathered on the lawns of the provincial legislature. One of the best ways of combating that kind of arrogance is to keep gathering in larger and larger numbers – regardless of what political stripes who may or may not wear – with the singular message that fair, accessible hospital services is an issue that rises above partisan politics.

The diminishing of our hospital services as we have already witnessed through the closing of emergency rooms in Port Colborne and Fort Erie, the closing of beds in hospitals across the region, and plans to close down other services and eventually concentrate them in a new hospital complex stuck off in a corner of west St. Catharines, is something that effects us all.

Let that be known through strength in numbers by showing up this Tuesday, March 9 between 3 and 6:30 p.m. at the Welland Lions Club on 414 River Road (off Hwy. 58 in Welland) for this public hearing.

The concerns and ideas residents share at this public hearing will be incorporated into a report the Ontario Health Coalition delivers to the provincial government at a later date.

For more information visit the Ontario Health Coalition’s website at www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca.

(click on  www.niagaraatlarge.com  for Niagara At Large and more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our greater binational Niagara region.)