Rally Slams Niagara Health System For Mismanaging Superbug Crisis

 By Doug Draper

The rally began with a moment of silence for the 16 people who have so far died in an outbreak of a highly infectious C. difficile superbug in three of the Niagara, Ontario hospitals managed by the Niagara Health System.

Niagara Falls, Ontario Mayor Jim Diodati blasts NHS at rally. Photo by Doug Draper

One of the more than 150 people attending the rally, across from the NHS’s Greater Niagara General Hospital in Niagara Falls, Ontario this July 6, was Joyce Western. Her 89-year-old mother Marjorie Howse succumbed to those deadly C. diff spores after being admitted to the NHS’s St. Catharines General Hospital site this spring with a bout of pneumonia.

Western, in a story that appeared on the front page of The Globe and Mail this July 4, said she never would have agreed to the admission of her mother in the St. Catharines hospital if the NHS had informed the public earlier that the superbug was already there and spreading to patients.  “In my opinion,” she said, “if they (the seniors facility she was in) hadn’t transferred her to the (St. Catharines) hospital, she would still be alive.”

The failure of NHS brass to let the public know earlier about the C. difficile outbreak now plaguing three of its hospital sites, including St. Catharines, the GNGH site in Niagara Falls and the Welland General, seemed to infuriate those who spoke and attended the rally as much as the outbreak itself.

Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath talks to reporters following hospital rally. Photo by Doug Draper.

Wayne Gates, president of Local 199 of the Canadian Auto Workers and a councillor in Niagara Falls who organized the rally, blasted the NHS for using its first media briefing on the C. diff. crisis this June 5 to say that the rally was about politics.

“This is not about politics,” said Gates, and it shouldn’t be about the NHS trying to pass off any blame for what is happing in Niagara hospitals to doctors nurses and other front-line staff. It is about “you, you, you, and you have a right to know what is going on in our hospitals.

At that same July 6 NHS media conference,  NHS CEO Sue Matthews said NHS staff would not be attending the rally because it is focused on containing the C. diff outbreak. According to a report of her comments in The St. Catharines Standard, she said she hoped those attending the rally would ‘respect the feelings of people coming and going from the hospital, as they may be visiting someone stricken with C. difficile’.

Niagara Falls Liberal MPP Kim Craitor speaks at hospital rally.

The people attending the rally say they were there out of concern with the number of C. diff cases plaguing the NHS’s hospitals, and they don’t need a lecture from NHS administrators on caring for those affected patients and their families.

Niagara Falls Mayor Jim Diodati, who spoke at the rally, gestured back to a number of security guards the NHS had posted at the entrances to the Greater Niagara General Hospital while the rally was in full swing. “See all of the security guards out there,” he said. “They should give them some detergent and scrub brushes (to clean the hospital up).”

Diodati went on to slam the NHS for its failure to notify the public of C. diff deaths at its hospital sites earlier. Pregnant women and others in the community, who could have been exposed, were going into those hospitals several days before the NHS publicly reported the superbug outbreak he said.

“I don’t know what they are waiting for,” added Diodati of the need for a change in management at the NHS  “If they are waiting for public outrage, multiple deaths, national attention or class-action suits, (it is) coming. It is all on its way.”

Kim Craitor, the provincial Liberal government MPP who Diodati credited for taking heat for running up against his own government on NHS issues, began is words to those attending the rally by saying; “You come first and party politics comes second.”

“At some point,” continued Craitor, who has been among those who has been at the forefront of pressing for an open and independent review of the way the NHS is managing hospital services here, “we (meaning all political parties) have to sit down and work together for a better health care system.”

“This is not about the health care workers inside that hospital,” said Craitor as he gestured back at the Niagara Falls hospital site behind him. “They are good people. What we have here is a crisis of confidence in this hospital system.”

Andrea Horwath, Ontario’s NDP leader, told the rally her party has been “banging (its) head” to work together with the governing Liberals to improve health care services in the province, but to little avail. Hospital CEOs and other administrators continue to collect six-figure salaries and benefits while front-line services are cut.

“Frontline care doesn’t seem to be the priority anymore and nowhere is that more apparent than here in Niagara,” she said. Calling for a cap on administrators’ salaries, Horwath said “the focus should be on the emergency rooms, not on the salaries in the backrooms and board rooms.

“This rally is the culmination of a long, three-year fight for justice,” said Sue Salzer, who also spoke as the head of the south Niagara citizen group the Yellow Shirt Brigade, which has been fighting for fairer access for quality hospital care for the region’s residents.

“The NHS spin would have you believe that the HIP (the NHS’s ‘hospital improvement plan’) would provide improved health services to all of Niagara and I am here to say it was always  about  the almighty dollar. Attend an NHS Board meeting or a LHIN meeting. They are more interested in meeting a bottom line and covering their bottom ends than they are in ensuring top flight health care that we are here today demanding,” said Salzer.

“Anyone with an ounce of common sense including Joe the Plumber could see the closure of so many existing services would be a recipe for disaster.”

In a July 7 article in The Toronto Star, Dr. Tom Closson, the CEO of the Ontario Hospital Association representing the NHS and other hospital boards across the province, is quoted calling the rally in Niagara Falls “reprehensible” at a time when the NHS is trying to combat the superbug outbreak.

“Get off your high horse,” Salzer responded to Closson in a note to Niagara At Large. “Come on down and listen to what the doctors will tell you about the problems in the Niagara Health System. What is reprehensible is the numbers of doctors that are being forced to leave South Niagara because of lost hospital privileges, loss of their specialties, NHS policies of secrecy or because of being just plain fed up.”

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