NHS Chair Insists Hospital Services In Niagara, Ontario Are Already Subject To ‘Quality Control’

By Doug Draper

This May 5, Niagara At Large ran a commentary on this site arguing that hospital executives should simply be fired, not have their salaries adjusted downward, as the provincial government is now prosing if they are not delivering the best health care to the communities they serve.

Niagara Health System Board chair Betty-Lou Souter insists NHS already has quality care under control.

Suffice to say this commentator had Niagara Health System CEO Debbie Sevenpifer and her administrative minions in mind when I made that argument. After all, what would it matter if they had their salaries reduced to the point where they were working for minimum wage if they are mismanaging something as critical as hospital services in this region?

But according to a May 7 article in the St. Catharines Standard – a paper that has never shown any shame when it comes to reciting, according to scripts of the NHS, the state of hospital care across this region –  Betty-Lou Souter, chair of the board of the Niagara Health System, claims that the province’s proposed ‘Excellent Care for all Act’ (the bill calling for a closer tie between executive wages and performance) should have little impact on the NHS.

The reason for that, Souter apparently went on to explain to that paper, is that the NHS already has an ‘internal command and a quality council composed of medical staff who report to the board’.

“The foundation is in place,” Souter continued. “We continually look at quality being one of our cornerstones.”

Is that so, one can only wonder what planet  Souter spends most of her time living on? It certainly couldn’t be on one that has very much contact with people in Niagara Falls, Welland, Pelham, Port Colborne, Wainfleet or Fort Erie.

Does she have any desire to get to the bottom of why countless of thousands of residents across this region feel that the NHS is mismanaging hospital services in their communities? Does she have any real grasp of why so many of these folks feel their hospital services are being downsized and stand to be further downsized as Sevenpifer and company celebrate the building of the only new hospital complex this region may get provincial funding for (for decades)  in the north end of Niagara, on the outskirts of a big-box retail jungle in west St. Catharines?

Does Souter really expect all these people, who feel they’ve been so disenfranchised as more and more hospital services are consolidated and concentrated in Niagara’s north end where the NHS’s political pal, St. Catharines MPP and McGuinty cabinet minister Jim Bradley has his little fiefdom, to believe there is any quality council, or whatever it is, in operation here?

If she is that disconnected from the interests and concerns of residents across the central and southern communities of Niagara when it comes to hospital care, then maybe she should be fired too.

Sue Salzer, a Fort Erie resident and head of the Yellow Shirt Brigade, a citizens group fighting for the restoration of fair and accessible hospital services in Niagara’s southern tier, was given only token coverage at the end of the Standard piece, prepared by someone from something called the QMI Agency, which sounds like some kind of a p.r. or marketing outfit. And it might just as well be, given most of the marketing crap that passes for news in this newspaper.

 But in an interview for Niagara At Large on this subject, Salzer stressed a few points the rest of might take into account here.

The first is that the notices for appointments to the NHS board are advertised to travel through the office of CEO Sevenpifer and the sycophants in her administration – in other words the board members are hardly in any kind of objective position to evaluate the performance of Sevenpifer and her fellow executives on behalf of the people of this region.

Second, Salzer says that she’s also concerned, as are so many others in central and southern tiers of Niagara,  that the province’s ‘Excellent Care For All Act’ might simply mean Sevenpifer/Souter and company can get away with reducing the NHS’s ballooning deficit by cutting back on even more services in hospitals across the region.

Just so you know, Niagara At Large put in a call to NHS board chair Betty-Lou Souter this May 7 but never heard back from her. Not so unsuspected.

What do you think, dear readers? Share your views below.

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