Niagara Hospital Bureaucrats ‘Celebrate’ While Our Region’s Hospital Services Burn

By Doug Draper

In a week in which the state of Niagara’s hospital services has taken quite the ripping in Ontario’s legislative assembly, the head of the body responsible for operating most of the hospitals across the region capped it off with what she called some ‘long-awaited…great news’.

The $1.5-billion plus new hospital complex the NHS is building on the fringes of west St. Catharines rather than somewhere in the centre of the region.

The $1.5 billion-plus hospital complex for Niagara in the outskirts of west St. Catharines under construction. Niagara Health System CEO Debbie Sevenpifer, in a February 19 memorandum “to all Niagara Health System employees, physicians and volunteers,” announced that the province’s Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care has managed to scare up an additional $14 million in funding for the NHS’s current fiscal year.

“This is great news for the Niagara Health System and long-awaited,” said Sevenpifer in the memorandum she circulated a day after a two-day debate in the provincial legislature over hospital cuts and their impacts on residents in Niagara and surrounding regions that you can find related stories on, including hansard from those provincial debates, by clicking on www.niagaraatlarge.com.

Sevenpifer went on to say that the $14 million infusion of funds from the province, which is basically just a drop in the bucket compared to the tens-of-millions of dollars in debt load the NHS is carrying and the more than $1.5 billion it will have us paying for a new hospital complex in the wrong location, “is a gold medal day for the Niagara Health System.

Celebrate?” A “golden medal day?”

What kind of twilight zone or alternative universe is Sevenpifer and her minions living in?

Talk about celebration to the continuous line-up of people waiting hours on end at emergency rooms for health service. Talk about it to the overworked doctors and nurses trying to look after them. Talk about it as you continue to close beds and shut down services at smaller hospitals around the region, including the emergency rooms at the Fort Erie and Port Colborne hospitals.

Talk about a ‘golden medal day ‘ to Tim Anzovino and Denise Kennedy – the parents of Reilly Anzovino, a Fort Erie teen who died this past Christmas holiday season just before or after the time she arrived at an emergency room at the Welland hospital, when she could have been rushed to one of the emergency rooms in Fort Erie or Port Colborne, had they not been closed.

But what the heck! Sevenpifer and company just got an additional $14 million from the province’s Liberal government and company, including Jim Bradley, the local St. Catharines MPP and cabinet minister and lap dog for the NHS , whose riding the new hospital will go in defiance of all calls over the last eight years for a site for this new complex that is more central for all Niagara residents.

Bradley and company would have this region live with possibly the only new hospital complex we will get in Niagara for the next two or three decades in one of the most traffic-congested, un-smart growth sites in his riding anyway.

For a few comments from the south end of Niagara on Sevenpifer’s memo of celebration, I will leave the last word, with no apologies, Sue Salzer, a concerned resident of Fort Erie who leads the Yellow Shirt Brigade, a group backed by thousands of citizens in that area advocating for fair access to hospital services for all Niagarians, who is taking time of out her life as a volunteer citizen to speak out and is making nothing – not one penny – off this important issue.

Salzer had this to say. “The announcement of a further 14 million to the coffers of the NHS is not a joyous announcement. For there is no mention that it will directly benefit patient care… “Instead, we see it will fund in part the ill-conceived ‘hospital improvement plan’. This same plan closed the operating rooms, the medical deds and the emergency rooms of the former hospitals in Fort Erie and Port Colborne. With additional funding can we now foresee similar disastrous results about to befall (the hospitals) in Welland and Niagara Falls?”

“At a time when ambulances are left to linger outside emergency rooms for lack of space, surgeries are being cancelled and delayed, and 39 more beds scheduled to close. Surely a funding announcement from the CEO should mention at least in passing that patient care will improve and more beds will not be closed. Implementation of the HIP does not seem to be accomplishing that goal. Just a reminder that the Municipal Councils of the Southern Tier and The Regional Council of Niagara unanimously passed a moratorium resolution calling for a re-evaluation of the HIP. Is full-steam ahead the only answer they will receive? ”

“More money is not the answer to the NHS problems. Unless future funding is firmly designated to actual patient care and funding for hospital beds to remain open, I fear there is not enough Health Care dollars to satisfy the NHS budget demands. Bucks for Beds is the only way money should flow to the NHS.”

(Please click on  www.niagaratlarge.com  for Niagara At Large for more news and commentary on this and other issues.)