A Comment By Pat Scholfield
Speaking as a resident of Port Colborne for over 54 years, I was keenly interested in hearing about the Auditor General’s report just released, particularly relating to the health care system and more specifically to the Niagara Health System in Niagara where I reside.
Pat Scholfield
The LHIN (Local Health Integration Network) and the Niagara Health System (the board responsible for managing most of our region’s hospitals) have been insisting that one of the main problems with our overcrowded ERs and long wait times is because people are using emergency rooms inappropriately.
However, the Auditor General’s report said this conclusion is wrong. The report (released this fall by Auditor General Jim McCarter) concludes that a lack of inpatient beds is the culprit. Why do we have a shortage of inpatient beds? The LHIN and the Niagara Health System would have you believe the main reason for a shortage of beds is because people should not stay in the hospital, but should instead go to Long Term Care Homes and/or go home.
This may be partly true. But they are not telling you that since the 1990s, hospital beds have been closed and frontline staff has been cut to reduce costs.
Since 1990, the hospital beds across the province totaled 50,000. Today they are nearly half that total. Slashing beds and frontline staff went into high gear in Niagara when the Niagara Health System and the LHIN approved the Hospital Improvement Plan. This resulted in emergency departments being closed in Fort Erie and Port Colborne and 100 beds and accompanying staff was on the cutting board. ER wait times and paramedic offloading delays have escalated since to dangerous highs.
True, we do need more Long Term Care beds and more support care to allow the Aging At Home Provincial policy to be successful as the LHIN and NHS have proposed. But the LTC beds are not in place yet and Community Care Access Centre, the organization that is to give patients at home needed support, has had their funding cut.
Therefore, it is irresponsible and dangerous to cut beds and staff until these necessary enablers are in place. The LHIN and the NHS need to go back to the drawing board.
Restore Port Colborne and Fort Erie emergency departments and acute beds until the government can afford facilities for alternate care and safe and appropriate access to life saving and acute services.
(Pat Scholfield is a Port Colborne resident, representative of the Peoples Health Care Coalition and long-time citizen advocate for equitable, accessible hospital services for all the region’s residents.)
(Click on Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our greater binational Niagara region.)
Niagara At Large 
Pat,
I agree with your informed positions, but I would take it further, as I’m sure you would. Restoring and then maintaining Emergency Services in Port Colborne and Fort Erie is a necessity , not only in the short term, but in the long term as well. As Canadians, we must restore what is rightfully ours, and that is a First Class Health Care System. We can not and should not settle for a Third Rate/Third World system. Thanks to the Neo-Conservatives/Neo-Liberals, our international reputation has suffered enough. It’s time for Canada to move forwards, rather than backwards.
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The money spent on TV,Radio, Newspapers etc. is simply a waste of money. It is a smoke screen to pretend that we are being serviced appropriately which in fact we all know we are not! The new blitz to cover up their inadequacies is the online CARE blarney that you can tell them your troubles & they will help you. Instead of that distant reach to help I would sincerely appreciate that $$ be put in” hands on help” (Dr.’s/nurses) and opening more beds to accomodate our people. They weren’t satisfied desecrating Fort Erie and Port Colborne hospitals they are on the march to Welland and will do a number on them too. Where are the rest of the Doctors? Why aren’t they standing up against this “wave of terror” that has beset their Profession and turned it into a building ,not a people priority. The need for change has NEVER been the issue …. the way the change is done is a MAJOR DISASTER & continues its Ogre-like way through our communities!! People wake up and smell the coffee!!
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Anne,
John Snoblen was literally caught on tape that they needed to CREATE a crisis, and BANKRUPT the education system before making changes.
The only reason that his tactic DIDN’T work, is that teachers were aware of his strategy.
It IS unfortunate that there aren’t more doctors and nurses protesting these changes.
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A local doctor told me that changes similar to the one’s in Niagara did not work out west, so he questioned why they’d try it here.
We should also consider that the business model of P3 hospitals is inefficient. For example, the private sector can’t secure loans at the same low rate as the government, and profits go elsewhere other than back into the system when the funding is private.
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Agreed Mark, why Did they try something that failed out West?
-w-
OTOH, please note that All of the people who earn Income from the Health System are TAXED by governments, whether they be Employees, self-employed Doctors, Pharmacies, Landlords (P3), Banks, etc. Somehow, no one takes this ‘Tax Recovery’ concept into account when calculating true net cost to the Treasury.
The main benefit of P3 to the Ontario government is that they can pass the cost forward to our children/grandchildren, at a time when they are spending well beyond Our means to Buy Votes from US.
By moving payment to the future, they also pay today’s debt with future Pennies instead of Dollars, because governments have the ability to create Inflation. (Have you noticed lately how few times you can pay for anything with a coin smaller than a Loon or Doubloon? )
The profit that we all get to keep After paying taxes, are spent wherever we personally decide. Those dollars make more profits for other businesses who pay the taxes that we need to have OHIP.
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The reason nurses and doctors are not speaking out is that they are threatened. If you need your job you must shut up. Nobody wants to chance being the whistleblower. Maybe we need help from Wikileaks!
As for recovery at home, many people do not have the luxury of family and friends to take care of them. Especially with older folks, often the loved one who is supposed to be the care giver is physically unwell themselves or has dementia or Alzheimers. Those who are being placed after discharge are often far from their home town with no transit so their elderly spouses cannot even visit them. One Ontario hospital even made their staff wear buttons suggesting it was better to go home instead of staying in the hospital. Public uproar ended that policy really quickly!!!
In addition, since that policy has been instituted, there has been a marked increase in return ER visits and hospital readmissions (and undoubtedly deaths) from sepsis and other complications due to people being sent home too soon and without adequate follow up care.
As I said in a previous post, the people gutting the system from an office desk do not have to go home after work and deal with the emotional consequences of having lost a patient needlessly due to the constraints imposed upon them and the unnecessary exacerbation of problems arising from being sent home too early.
The system is being gutted because 1) private insurance wants to take over and 2) because the government no longer wants to bear its responsibility for the health care of the people whose taxes support it.
Much better to send money overseas to “win the hearts and minds” of countries who hate us, to send our young off to die in a foreign land, or pour money into the bottomless, corrupt cesspools that are some third world countries. If your children were starving, would you feed the neighbour’s children before your own?
The money IS there if we had fewer corrupt a-holes running the country and fewer administrators hiring consultants to do their jobs. What do they do if consultants hand them all of their “solutions”? Some of their consultants are banks like tD who tell them how to cut costs. Great, a bank running the hospitals!
The unfortunate part of this scenario is that WE are letting it happen.
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Dr. Bonsu is speaking up. There’s an article in The Tribune.
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Thank you and thank Dr.P. Bonsu for speaking up.
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Why is no one advocating for more Long Term Care Homes, with our aging population? If we’re short of them now, how about when the boomers hit? Only so many people can be cared for at home. My Dad was one of them, after 16 years of Parkinsons and a stroke made him a 2 person transfer, he could not be taken care of at home, despite my Mother’s strong desire to have him there. If school properties *really* have to be closed, then the Region should be buying the land for Long Term Care homes, if that is the reality of projected demographics.
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Now that’s a great suggestion!
And School Boards are required to sell to other Governments first, before selling to developpers.
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The former Westbrook/Welland High on West Main has been sitting empty for some time now.
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Is there anybody speaking up about the fact that 90% of the beds in the new hospital will be private rooms? Does that mean that those of us without that type of coverage will be billed for our stay? This is just another example of creeping privatization that I am not sure others have raised already, though many good points have been put forth in this forum.
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What do you mean 90% of the bed are going to be private rooms in the new St. Catharines Hospital?
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What do you mean when you say that 90% of the beds in the new St. Catharines hospital will be private? I don’t understand so please enlighten me.
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Excellent point. Profits versus equitable health care. I’m not so proud of this country anymore.
One would have thought that we could have learned lessons from our neighbours to the south.
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Excellent point, Angela. Profits versus equitable health care. I’m not so proud of this country anymore.
One would have thought that we could have learned lessons from or neighbours to the south.
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Pat and Linda McKellar, I wish I could send your analyses to Natalie Foster, Patient Relations Specialist at St. Catharines General Hospital because they explain so clearly what happened to my mother Lucy McCarthy who because she was elderly was stitched up and sent back to her retirement home to die. Even upon readmission a day later she was ignored by the staff until she was obviously disoriented and vomiting blood. I want to stop that from happening to anyone else.
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The issue about (the beds) was in our paper about the new hospital, the new facilities it will have, etc. 90% of the beds will be private rooms for the purpose of infection control, but I know this is going to wind up costing people for their stay, and I think we need to get some good information out there before we assume this is going to be all OHIP.
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