Despite Huge Show Of Support For West Niagara Hospital, Residents Have Very Tough Fight On Their Hands

A Brief Commentary by Doug Draper

You have got to hand it to the people of west Niagara for showing up in droves for their hospital.

According to reports, somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 gathered on the grounds of a high school in Grimsby, Ontario this May 2 at a rally aimed at pressuring Ontario’s Liberal government to reinstate the tens-of-millions of dollars it recently withdrew to rebuild the aging West Lincoln Memorial Hospital.

The West Lincoln Memorial Hospital, located in Grimsby, is by many accounts, one of the best run smaller hospitals in the province. Many living in the communities it serves, including  Grimsby, West Lincoln, Lincoln and Stoney Creek, and even many living outside those communities have had nothing but praise for the quality of care they receive at this hospital which is so determined to rebuild its facilities for the future.

Little surprise then that so many people from Grimsby and surrounding communities turned up for The May 2 rally. It was an impressive show of public force to get the $136.8 million rebuild for the hospital back on the rails. However, it remains to be seen whether rallies like this or an online petition residents are signing, or any number of heated question from opposition MPPs at Queen’s Park will have any impact at all on government of Premier Dalton McGuinty, his health minister Deb Matthews and the Hamilton, Niagara, Haldimand, Brant Local Health Integration Network, the body of bureaucrats created by the province to shape hospital and other health care services in the region.

If the history of the past four or five years offers any clue, the chances this provincial government will reverse its recent decision to remove the rebuild funding for this hospital from its so-called “austerity budget” of month ago are not very good at all.

There were similar rallies attended by thousands of residents in south Niagara, along with petitions and demonstrations in front of Queen’s Park after the Niagara Health System (a board responsible for the operation of the majority of hospital services in the region except for those at the West Lincoln Memorial and Hotel Dieu/Shaver sites) tabled a “hospital improvement plan” that called for closing emergency rooms at the hospitals in Fort Erie and Port Colborne.  Yet all of the petitions and public demonstrations that included doctors and other health-care workers from the hospitals did not stop the NHS, with the blessing of the LHIN and provincial government, from barging ahead with its plans to downgrade those emergency rooms to urgent care centres. 

Pleas from doctors and others in the region also did not stop the NHS and province from moving forward with the construction of the only major new hospital Niagara is likely to see built in the decades ahead in west St. Catharines rather than in a more central location in Niagara. When that hospital complex is opened a year from now, it is likely that residents in other areas of the region will see even more services moved to that complex from what are left of the hospitals in Niagara Falls, Welland, Fort Erie and Port Colborne.

It is all part of a larger plan that has been in the works across the province for at least a decade now to consolidate or integrate more and more hospital services at fewer sites which are more often the larger hospitals. In the process, smaller community hospitals like the ones in Fort Erie and Port Colborne and, earlier on, Niagara-on-the-Lake, are falling by the wayside.

And now it looks like the same fate could spell the beginning of the end for West Lincoln Memorial Hospital. Some of the closer observers of what has been happening to hospital services across the region have forecasted the sad circumstances this hospital is now facing for years now. After all, as fine a hospital as West Lincoln Memorial is, it is a smaller one that now finds itself located between larger hospital sites in the Hamilton area and the large complex being completed in west St. Catharines. 

In a province where consolidating health care services at fewer and larger sites for reasons that may have more to do with economies of scale than improving the quality of (let alone access to) those services the rule of the day, what chance does West Lincoln Memorial Hospital have?

Yet I would say never give up the fight if there is any chance at all. The West Lincoln site was placed on the chopping block by the former Conservative government of Mike Harris more than a decade ago, and similar demonstrations of support from the public led to the government backing down. The one advantage west Niagara residents may have now over residents in south and central Niagara in recent years gone by is that the McGuinty government has been reduced to a minority and is therefore more vulnerable than it was prior to last fall’s provincial election to strong opposition.

Long live West Lincoln Memorial Hospital.

Niagara At Large is reposting the following link for an online petition to the government to keep its promise to fund the hospital rebuild. You can add your name to it

by clicking on http://www.petitiononlinecanada.com/petition/reconsider-cancelling-rebuild-of-west-lincoln-memorial-hospital/867 .

Niagara At Large also invites anyone willing to share their full names with their comments to post them below.