By Sue Salzer
As I watched our Ontario legislature in session today (this February 28), I was impressed with the colourful representative from Welland, Peter Kormos, and his use of the expressive term ‘gonads’.
Fort Erie health care advocate Sue Salzer
Gonads is precisely the term to be used when referring to the council of the City of Hamilton.
They are standing firm and telling the Hamilton/Niagara LHIN (local health integration network) and the province’s minister of health, Deb Matthews, that the downloading of Ambulance service on their taxpayers is unacceptable.
The emergency department of McMaster Hospital will no longer service adults as of this coming April 4th due to a centralizing restructuring plan. Without previous consultation, Hamilton Council learned recently that over One Million Dollars yearly would be necessary to provide staff and ambulance service to take patients to more remote hospital ERs. “Taxpayers should not have to shoulder the burden” states Councillor Whitehead
In May of 2010, Niagara Region was faced with the same dilemma to the tune of more than $3 million dollars yearly, to be assumed by Niagara taxpayers. The closure of the Emergency Rooms of Port Colborne and Fort Erie incurred addition travel time, extra staff and additional ambulances to service patients being taken to other ERs.
With very little discussion, Niagara’s regional councillors, who were caught between a rock and a hard place, acquiesced to the downloading demand. One explanation could be that there was an expectation that the Province would accept responsibility for the additional costs. Only 50 per cent was forthcoming.
Times are tough and the in midst of current budget deliberations this same $3 million sits on the books year after year.
Region is doing an admirable job at keeping a minimal increase to taxpayers and perhaps this new council should look at revisiting the issue of this downloaded expense that could haunt us for years to come. …. at least until adequate emergency care services are returned to the southern tier of Niagara.
Join the Hamilton contingency stance and return this budget amount to the Health agencies that were responsible for the Hospital “Improvement” Plan that created the necessity for this additional funding.
(Maybe the Hamilton Mountain News will be upset if we replay a bit of one of its articles here, but hopefully not. All the same here are the first few lines of a recent story in the Mountain News that should sound familiar to any resident who is being stuck with paying higher property taxes for downloaded decisions by the Niagara Health System here.)
Councillors blame province for $1 million tab
Hamilton Mountain News
Sat Feb 26 2011
Hamilton politicians are demanding the provincial government pay for over $1 million in extra costs the city will be forced to spend when Hamilton Health Sciences closes the McMaster University Medical Centre emergency room to adults starting April 4.
The west end hospital, as part of an HHS restructuring plan, will become a pediatric specialty hospital, with some adult day surgery continuing. An urgent care centre will open in the west end for non-emergency care. The adult services at McMaster will be distributed to HHS’s other health-care facilities within the city.
But the children-only emergency care at McMaster University will, according to a city-sponsored consultant’s report, cost Hamilton $1.1 million. The report concluded there will be an increase in travel time “for EMS to complete adult calls for service that originate in the west end.”
“It is unfair for local property taxpayers who will pick up the cost,” said Ward 6 (east Mountain) Coun. Tom Jackson. “It was not their plan.”
(Visit the Hamilton M0untain News at www.hamiltonmountainnews.com .)
Sue Salzer is a resident of Fort Erie, Ontario and a leader of a citizens group in south Niagara called the Yellow Shirt Brigade, pressing for better access to hospital services for populations in central and south Niagara.
(Visit Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater Niagara region and beyond.)
Niagara At Large 
And so it continues. The taxpayers will be burdened further by this private funding (P3 model), inefficiencies will continue to grow, while the private partners extract their profits.
The cost: less efficient health care, less equitable health care, and higher taxes. The poor get poorer, the rich get richer, while efficient, equitable health care goes down the drain.
Canada is to be congratulated for its wise decisions.
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Hate to break it to you Mark, but it won’t be efficient either because of overcrowding, staff burnout and sicktime and subsequent increased costs for transfers between institutions, etc.
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How the Hamilton LHIN got away with it in the first place is beyond me. The network of hospitals in Hamilton was ‘sewn’ together by the medical school many years ago. It was efficient then and now it is not. I know, as I was a professor there then (in the McMaster Field Unit at the inception of the medical school). Two years ago, a McMaster faculty member on the LHIN resigned from the LHIN in protest. In spite of all protests, the local LHIN, the ON Ministry of Health, and the Private (P3) Partners forged ahead and ran roughshod over all sensible people in Hamilton. Whether the City government can alter things is a moot point. Anyway, one person is on top of things – and that is Fort Erie’s own Sue Salzer.
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A note on efficient, effective and humane health care delivery…
Not so long ago in Hamilton, some 80-100 public health nurses, who doubled as school nurses, were enabled to screen and filter children with emotional problems. That is, PHN’s were the front line for our specialized childrens’ service. That was efficient, effective and humane health care delivery. Now, in Hamilton, all those children must be filtered through one phone line. That is centralized, inefficient and expensive, terribly delayed and inhumane health care delivery.
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