By Doug Draper
The controversy swirling around the Niagara Health System and the way it manages hospital care across the region won’t be taking a rest during the holiday season – at least not for Niagara Falls MPP Kim Craitor.
NHS CEO Debbie Sevenpifer, flanked by senior staff, answers complaints from Niagara Falls councillors this fall. Photo by Doug Draper
The Liberal MPP says he will be spending at least some of the holiday period preparing a brief on the beleaguered hospital system for Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews.
“I will be arranging a meeting with (the minister) in the month of January,” Craitor told Niagara At Large in a recent interview. “I am putting together a brief for her and I will also be sharing it with the public.”
Craitor’s decision to meet with the minister follows a resolution the city council in Niagara Falls passed late last month, urging the province to “step in and appoint an investigator to investigate and report on the quality of the management and administration of the Niagara Health System.”
The NHS is the nine-year-old body responsible for operating most of the hospitals across the region except for the Shaver Hotel Dieu site in south St. Catharines and the West Lincoln Memorial site in Grimsby. It continues to draw the anger of thousands of Niagara residents who feel it is systematically cutting services in their community in an attempt to beat down or at least keep in check a $19-million operating deficit and a long-term debt totaling $116 million.
Niagara Falls MPP Kim Craitor
The Niagara Falls resolution, which has since received the backing of councils in Fort Erie (which makes up the southern end of Craitor’s riding), Port Colborne and Wainfleet, spoke to the NHS’s operating deficit, the black balling of the NHS by the Ontario Nurses Association as a has hospital system to work for and the exodus of some doctors form the Niagara Falls hospital site’s emergency department as reasons for demanding a provincial investigation.
The resolution also cites the NHS’s so-called Hospital Improvement Plan, released in the summer of 2008 that outlined plans to consolidate maternity and a growing number of other health-care services at the new hospital complex the organization is building in west St. Catharines.
During a presentation to the Niagara Falls council this past fall and about month before the resolution was tabled, NHS CEO Debbie Sevenpifer tried to convince councillors that the changes her organization has been making to the scheduling of doctor’s at that city’s hospital site was reducing waiting times and improving overall care for patients.
A number of the councillors didn’t buy it and some used the opportunity to slam the NHS for not building the new hospital complex (complete with first-of-a-kind cancer and cardiac treatment facilities for Niagara) in a more central location in the region.
“I suggest to you that (the complex being built in St. Catharines’ west end) is going to be a regional hospital and that is sad,” said Wayne Thomson, a longtime councillor and former mayor of the city.
Many residents in the south end of Niagara also blast the NHS for not choosing a more central site for a complex that will eventually house services from their community hospitals.
Niagara At Large 