Another Note On The NHS Mess

A Commentary by Doug Draper 

I’ve got to be honest. I’m getting kind of tired after all these years of writing about the nonsense coming out of the Niagara Health System.

Road widening and other costly infrastructure work underway near new NHS super hospital in west St. Catharines, Ontario. File photo by Doug Draper

There again, it is hard to let the story appearing on the front page of July edition of the St. Catharines Standard and its two Sun Media companion papers, the Niagara Falls Review and Welland Tribune. The story begins like this; There might yet be hope for pediatrics and obstetrics services with south Niagara’s hospitals. .. “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” Niagara Health System supervisor Kevin Smith said.

Well, excuse me Mr. NHS supervisor, but there is plenty of life in Niagara, Ontario’s southern tier to justify keeping pediatrics and obstetrics services there. There are more than 175,000 people if you include Niagara Falls in the mix with Welland, Port Colborne, Fort Erie and Wainfleet, and they were never told those services would be taken away until the NHS’s so-called ‘Hospital Improvement Plan’ was tabled four years ago this summer by the system’s former CEO Debbie Sevenpifer and her board full of brown-nosers and sycophants.

In fact, right up to within months of that plan’s release, Sevenpifer and her minions were appearing before city and town councils in south Niagara, assuring them that they were “fully committed to community based hospitals,” including the ones in their municipalities. You can find a record of them saying that in the minutes kept by the clerks of those municipalities and, of course, those sitting on the councils had every reason to be believe the words meant that what was left of the acute care services in their community hospitals, including pediatrics and obstetrics, would be spared.

Had Sevenpifer and company told the good people of south Niagara earlier on what they already knew, according to inside sources and internal documents slipped to at least a few of us in the media who dared to report on them. …. had they been more upfront with the good people and told them that their ultimate plan was to consolidate most of the acute care services in Niagara at the new super hospital site the NHS was planning to build in west St. Catharines, more than just a few of those people might have joined dozens of doctors in the Niagara Falls and Welland areas in demanding that the new hospital be built at a more central location in the region. 

But Sevenpifer and company decided to save that bombshell news for the Hospital Improvement Plan they were directed by the then fledgling Hamilton, Niagara, Haldimand Brant Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) to complete and make public four summers ago. By then, it was almost two late to mount the kind of public lobby campaign that would be needed to turn the decision on locating the new hospital in south Niagara around.

So here we are now, less than a year away from the opening of the west St. Catharines hospital site and facing tens-of-millions of dollars in infrastructure cost, including road widening and plans for a new interchange northeast of the hospital site, off Highway 406. All of that cost, which people in south St. Catharines who have already seen some of their hospital services disappear, will have to share, instead of locating the hospital in a more central location in Niagara where most or all of the appropriate road and highway and other infrastructure is already there. Add to that, the recent idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on another new hospital for the southern tier to make up, at least in part, for the failure to locate the other hospital at a more central location in the first place.

 Yet according to that July 12 Sun Media story, Smith says he can only see going along with a call from doctors in Welland and Niagara Falls not to move pediatrics and obstetrics services out of southern tier hospitals if it doesn’t cost the NHS any additional money.

Isn’t it interesting how tens-of-millions of our tax dollars can be blown to accommodate a hospital at a location many people, including regional planners, warned would lead to cost and other problems. Yet we now can’t spend any more money to keep key services in the south end.

Now I am going to wrap this column up before I write something I might regret.

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