By Doug Draper
Cindy Forster, the provincial member of parliament for Niagara, Ontario’s Welland Riding, is planning to reach out to every constituent in her riding for their views on what they feel is working and not working when it comes to hospital and related health services in the region.
Welland, Ontario riding MPP Cindy Forster
Forster, who was elected as the NDP member for the Welland Riding in last October’s provincial election, told Niagara At Large she is preparing a survey that will soon be sent to every household in the riding which includes the communities of Welland, Port Colborne, Fort Erie and Thorold.
“We are going to ask (residents in those communities) about hospital services and we are also going to ask them for their views on health care in general, including home care,” said Forster, who was a nurse and area representative for the Ontario Nurses Association, including nurses working for the Niagara Health System, before she was elected MPP.
A key reason for the survey, stressed Forster, is to receive as much input as she can from residents in her riding about the recommendations released earlier this May by Kevin Smith, the provincially appointed supervisor of the NHS, for reforming the hospital system.
Those recommendations include a call to the province to build a news hospital in south Niagara that would replace current hospital sites in Welland, Port Colborne, Fort Erie and Niagara Falls. What remains of the old Niagara-on-the-Lake hospital site would also be closed.
Since Smith wants input from the mayor’s for those municipalities by June 15 on where a new hospital should go, “time is of the essence for getting the survey out,” Forster said.
Forster has also contacted Kim Craitor, the Liberal MPP in Niagara Falls, to ask if he would join in sending out the survey to his constituents in the Niagara Falls, Fort Erie and Niagara-on-the-Lake and, in a separate interview, Craitor said he favours the idea. He said he hopes to meet with Forster this week to agree on a set of questions for the survey and logistics of getting it out and completed on time to meet Smith’s deadline for community feedback.
Craitor, who has had a record of questioning his own Liberal government on where it has gone with hospital services in the region, said he also believes the survey, sent out by MPP from two different parties, would serve as at least one “gesture” that health care concerns in Niagara trumps partisan politics.
Niagara Falls, Ontario riding MPP Kim Craitor
Yet survey or no survey, Craitor over his eight years as an MPP, he has continuously received calls from constituents, expressing their concerns over where the NHS has taken hospital services in the region, and he feels he has a “pretty good feel” for where his constituents stand on everything up to and including Smith’s recent recommendations for changing the system.
In the meantime, Forster has received at least a few comments from constituents in her Welland Riding who ask why she has only recently spoken on the NHS and did not do so while she was still serving, up to a year ago, as a Niagara regional councillor for Welland.
Forster told Niagara At Large that she had no choice then but to declare a conflict of interest when debate at the regional council level turned to the NHS because she was still working and representing nurses in the health care system. “But I believe I still was speaking out for health care every day by representing nurses. It was just that I was doing it in a different way.”
Smith, who was appointed supervisor of the beleaguered and besieged NHS late last summer, unveiled his recommendations for changing the hospital system this past May 3. They include plans for a new hospital somewhere in south Niagara, even as the NHS continues construction on a new hospital complex in west St. Catharines that will cost taxpayers more than $1.5 billion.
At least some south Niagara residents, including mayors for municipalities in the southern tier, wonder how likely it is that the province will approve the construction of another new hospital, at a cost of at least $800 million. They also wonder what will happen to pediatric and other services in hospitals still operating in the southern tier when the new hospital in St. Catharines opens sometime next year.
Will those services remain in the current hospitals until a new south Niagara hospital is built (if it ever is) or will they be transferred, as indicated in a “hospital improvement plan” a former NHS board released four years ago, to the new north Niagara hospital site?
Niagara Falls, Ontario Mayor Jim Diodati, for one, has made it clear that he wants answers to some of those key questions from Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews as soon as possible.
You can view a complete version of the NHS supervisor’s report and recommendations for reforming the hospital system by clicking on http://www.niagarahealth.on.ca/news/2012/05/03/dr-kevin-smith-presents-new-vision-for-nhs-hospitals .
(Niagara At Large invites our readers to share their views on this post below. NAL only posts comments by individuals who are also willing to share their first and last names.)
Niagara At Large 
Even if Mayor Diodati got Health Minister Deb Matthews to sign in blood that she agreed the province would build a new hospital for south Niagara, it would mean nothing. Remember when NHS CEO Deb Sevenpifer sent a letter through to Port Colborne’s Mayor Badawey in June/07 acknowledging she was fully committed to a full service hospital and a 24/7 ER at Port Colborne hospital. By the next summer, July/08, the NHS released the HIP (hospital improvement plan) recommending closing the OR, all acute beds and the ER in Port Colborne and Fort Erie. .
Don’t count on a new hospital. We need a Plan B now!
That is we need reasonable access to full service hospitals with 24/7 ERs right now……and that does not mean up in northwest St. Catharines.
Way to go Cindy and kudos for you in taking on this huge project.
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Deb Matthews should have been fired long ago. Not only will she not be around to keep any kind of promise she might make, but the McGuinty government isn’t likely to last out its term. It’s in chaos. It’s nice to know that our local MPPs understand who the important “stakeholders” are when it comes to hospital services — they actually care to ask what residents are thinking. Wow. Think that might catch on at the local government level? Not likely, eh.
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All the community Hospitals in South Niagara ran without red ink before Harris and his gang decided to play God and set up an extra layer of governance called the (UGH) NHS. This NHS and it’s appointed board felt they knew it all and would tolerate no professional ideas or input from the peoples who knew best the ones who had ran these cost efficient, well managed institutions since conception.
This world is full of CEOs and Appointed Boards put in place more as a patronage payback than expedient elected professional who have tenure in Hospital administration Operations and know right from wrong.
A closed mind is basically a dead mind and when this group of “Empire Builders” the NHS decided they knew it all the house of cards began to crumble. There was but one “ONLY” Public Consultation open to ALL stakeholders and that was held in the busy hallway of the Welland YMCA and like everything else the NHS Administration tried to do it failed miserably. They, Sevenpifer, and her hand picked representatives at that meeting including a rep from the LHIN refused the offer of a room from the staff of the YMCA and that further alienated the people who took the time to attend this “so called” Meeting.
During the meeting at the Welland Civic Center it was obvious that . Kevin Smith’s recommendations were considered more a stalling fiasco than a concrete proposal that could be believed. Most of people in attendance were concerned citizens along with professionals, such as Dr. T.M. Abraham who expressed utter dismay at what is taking place within the NHS as well as the LHIN. Other spoke of the past, of having community hospitals they could rely on not some “so called” center of excellence in the far reaches of St. Catharines. Alternative Cost effective solutions were discussed such as re-establishing the community Hospitals after they have been, one at a time, systematically .restructured and up graded.to fulfill the needs of the citizens as they previous had in the past. This would be a hell of a lot more cost effective than the.billion or so needed to build an other center of excellence.and it would be more inclusive.
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Help Save Our Hospitals!
Please send this video to everyone in Ontario who values their healthcare:
Contact Dalton McGuinty here:
http://www.daltonmcguinty.onmpp.ca/Contact.aspx
Contact Dwight Duncan here: http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/contact/index.html
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Even in St. Catharines, there is no bus service yet planned to go to the new hospital. While it isn’t that far from the big box stores where there is bus service, if you need hospital services and are in pain, or having trouble walking or whatever, what gives? But, I forgot. Everybody in this region drives their own cars, including all kids, seniors, blind people, amputees, and so forth. The quality of health care is deteriorating for everybody in this region. Even the hospital in St. Catharines will be under-resourced if the government intends this hospital to serve the entire region. Count on it.
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Yes I was surprised to see “MY” earlier response to No Hospital Services or the NHS but since then I have seen, witnessed and been a “Contact Person” during the untimely death of man who once served the Health Care service.as it used to be.
A neighbor’s wife spent 55 hours in labor at the new Taj Mahal only to find her baby needed further care and had to be moved to London. (Centre of Excellence be damned)
Recently an elderly tenant who spent three years being treated, basically at home, for cancer, was moved to the Welland hospital (for reasons I will not go into), then the next day to Port Colborne hospital.
I within a week went to the hospital to take him to his bank then to an apartment complex that allowed easier access. (He was alert and wanted to rent) As days passed, he still in the hospital, seemed to be deteriorating rapidly and on most occasions he was or seemed to be heavily sedated, sedated to the point where conversation was non existent. The one day with a fellow tenant attending we were told that he was in isolation caused by a “Super Bug infection” and that precautions must be taken Gloves, Gown etc.He was basically confined to bed and on one occasion about a month and a half into his stay I noticed his lower legs were getting dark in coloration, red then darker red to a bluish. I was not aware he was a diabetic so first i was not alarmed but as this coloration became almost black, then black I thought of gangrene. but he is in the hospital and they know Then within a few day I got a phone call from him telling me they are going to cut off his leg… visiting the hospital I asked if he had come back from surgery only to be told he is too sick to survive an operation of that severity.
I visited him on January 11th, 12th and 13th he was deeply sedated and his left leg was totally black, swiveled and the toes well need I say more… He died that night January 13th at 8;50 pm (My Birthday)
My Total experiences with the NHS has left me very pissed off and skeptical.
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