Hospital Review Could Be A ‘Farce’ – Citizen Watchdog

By Doug Draper

A so-called “independent review” of the Niagara Health System’s hospital restructuring plans is looking like it could be a “farce” before it even gets underway, says the head of a Niagara-based citizen group called the Yellow Shirt Brigade.

“A questionable review has now lost all credibility,” says the group leader Sue Salzer after learning this June 20 that the Local Health Integration Network for the Niagara, Hamilton, Brant and Haldimand areas – the LHIN body that oversees the NHS and approved its hospital restructuring plan in the first place – is already moving to limit the scope of the review.

“Before the committee members (for the review) are even announced, the LHIN now seems determined to alienate the public even further,” Salzer told Niagara At Large. “How can they possibly justify limiting the scope of an already weighted process to three pre-determined areas.”

Salzer was referring to media reports that the LHIN wishes to limit the review to three topics – clinical outcomes at the NHS’s hospital sites, administrative outcomes (whatever those are) and community confidence. She said the third topic is one that should take no time at all to review since, as she added, there is little or no community confidence in the NHS or its hospital plans, especially in Niagara’s central and southern municipalities.

Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews finally agreed to a review after more than a year of demands for an independent investigation of the NHS and its plans by thousands of Niagara citizens, seven of the region’s 12 local municipal councils and, finally this past winter, the regional council. It was the minister’s decision to include the LHIN and NHS on a steering committee to set the terms of reference for the review.

That decision has already had many municipal leaders and citizens in Niagara charging that there is no way the review can be truly objective or independent if two of the bodies that developed and approved the hospital restructuring plans are involved in setting the ground rules for it.

Niagara’s regional council is expected to discuss any representation it would have on the steering committee for the review at its meeting this Thursday, June 23. Salzer said she hopes regional councillors will object to any and all efforts by the LHIN and NHS to limit the scope of the review.

“It’s time Region objects to these limitations and demand a fair, unbiased and unlimited review before this farce is allowed to continue,” she said.

Calls for the review were driven, in part, by the closing more than a year ago of emergency rooms at hospital sites in Port Colborne and Fort Erie, and ongoing plans to move more of the region’s acute care services to a new hospital site in west St. Catharines when it opens in 2013.

(We encourage you to share your comments on this issue below and to encourage your friends and associates to visit Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com  for news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater Niagara region and beyond.)