Perhaps It Is Time For Niagara South To Start Thinking About Breaking Away From NHS And Campaigning For Its Own New Hospital

A Commentary by Doug Draper

I got to confess, I am getting tired of writing – over and over and over again – about the hospital mess in Niagara.

Just as they did at the Sept. 23 meeting of regional council, concerned residents from central and south Niagara fill the gallery on Sept. 8 for an earlier debate on hospital services.

So tired that I could no longer force myself to stay up as long as a gallery of concerned residents from Port Colborne and Fort Erie and Welland, Ontario attended a meeting of Niagara’s regional council this past September 23, most of who were wearing those ‘Yellow Shirts’ for groups fighting for fairer access to hospital services in south Niagara.

Many of those residents arrived at the meeting around 7 p.m. and toughed it out through a closed session of the council that dragged on for three hours and through discussions on a number of other issues before learning, at close to 2 a.m. the following morning, the outcome of a request for the regional government to support a call for a provincial investigation of the Niagara Health System and how that decade-old board is managing hospital operations across the region.

That call for an investigation came from a Toronto-based lobby group called the Ontario Health Coalition and from seven of Niagara’s 12 local municipalities, including Fort Erie, Port Colborne, Wainfleet, Welland, Niagara Falls, St. Catharines and Thorold, and from numerous citizens, many of them living in the region’s southern tier where the NHS closed emergency rooms at the Port Colborne and Fort Erie hospitals last year.

A majority of regional councillors said no to that request, just as a number of them did earlier this September at a committee-of-the-whole meeting, and opted instead for “work(ing) with the NHS to establish a more effective, regularized relationship to improve the quality of health care for the residents of Niagara.”  The working relationship will include semi-annual updates on how well things are going to improve the quality of care.

It was disappointing to the residents who shuffled out of the regional council chamber around two in the morning and drove back to communities in and around Port Colborne and Fort Erie where they have been witnessing, year after year now, the diminishing of hospital services, including the closing of beds and those emergency rooms, close to home.

“We have no hope any more that the NHS is going to listen to the concerns of people here,” Pat Scholfield, a Port Colborne resident who has been fighting for years for fair access to hospital services for the south end of the region. “We are just abandoned. We have no equitable access to acute care in Fort Erie and Port Colborne.”

Niagara Health System CEO Debbie Sevenpifer and boar chair Betty Lou Souter stress to regional councillors that "enhancing quality care" in area hospitals is "a key organizational priority." Photos by Doug Draper.

Indeed, NHS chief administrator Debbie Sevenpifer and board chair Betty Lou Souter can stress, as they did again at the region’s committee-of-the-whole meeting earlier this September, that “enhancing quality care and patient satisfaction is a key administrative goal.” There are thousands of people in south Niagara who have signed petitions, attended meetings in their communities, and driven to rallies in Toronto over the past two years who simply don’t believe this body which the province created 10 years ago to amalgamate most of the hospitals in Niagara. Whether the NHS cares to admit it or not, it has been facing a growing crisis of public confidence since it unveiled a “hospital improvement plan” for consolidating more of its services at fewer hospital sites. And there is little reason to believe that lack of confidence is going to recede as the NHS gets closer to opening a new hospital in west St. Catharines that, according to the plan, will ultimately house the lion’s share of the services, making it Niagara’s super hospital whether Sevenpifer and company agree to call it that or not.

At this point, this journalist, who has been following all of this fairly closely for the better part of the past 10 years, it is hard to see how another investigation of the NHS, particularly one conducted by the province that created it and often hides behind it when it announces closing more beds or an ER, is going to do much good for people in south Niagara who see more of the acute care services their hospitals used to provide migrating north.

It might make far more sense at this point for residents in south Niagara to take more of their concerns directly to the provincial government and to apply more heat directly to it to at least reopen the ER facilities in Port Colborne and Fort Erie in the short term. And in the longer term, it might do well to work with local politicians like Port Colborne Mayor Vance Badawey who has been consulting regularly with members of the medical community and with ordinary residents and others, with an eye to beefing up acute care services in south Niagara.

Although Badawey has not gone this far – at least so far as this journalists knows – it might also be in the best interest of south Niagara in the long run, to break away from the NHS and have its own hospital system, dedicated to assuring equitable, accessible services for the southern tier and dedicated, in the long run, to campaigning for a new hospital for that part of the region.

After all, Niagara’s regional government’ official policy is to encourage more growth in the future to the center and south. It was the province that gave final approval to locating the only new hospital being built in this region to date in the north end.

It is interesting to hear the province, NHS and local politicians in Niagara’s north end say that the new hospital being built at an estimated cost $1.5 billion in west St. Catharines (aside from the first-of-a-kind cancer, cardiac and tertiary mental health treatment centres for the whole region) is a hospital for St. Catharines and neighbouring Thorold and Niagara-on-the-Lake – to replace the aging, virtually spent St. Catharines General Hospital on Queenston Street and former Hotel Dieu on Ontario Street.

But if the new hospital, aside from those special centres mentioned above, is a “St. Catharines hospital” for serving 135,000 in that city, as St. Catharines regional councillor Tim Rigby emphasized at the Sept. 23 meeting, how does that square with an NHS plan for consolidating a bulk of the services from other hospitals across Niagara at that site when it is open? How does it square with the possibility that in the next few decades, the population in south and central Niagara communities may far outnumber the population in the St. Catharines area? Isn’t it time to start seriously planning for a new hospital to replace the aging hospitals (all of them now more than half a century old) in that end of the region too?

More on all of this later. In the meantime, we encourage you to share your comments below.

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