Niagara Health System Supervisor’s Final Report On Hospital Services Is Out

A Foreword by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

A year ago this September, Kevin Smith, assumed the role of supervisor of the Niagara Health System, the provincially created body (a body conceived by the Tim Hudak/Mike Harris Ontario Conservatives, by the way) that public opinion polls showed a majority of Niagara residents had little or no  confidence in any more.

Niagara Health System Supervisor Kevin Smith. File photo by Doug Draper

That made for one hell of a job for Kevin Smith and one could not help but wonder why he -the CEO of a far more highly respected St. Joseph’s Hospital system in the Hamilton region- would even agree to take it.

Smith was asked by the Ontario Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty, who was by then  beleaguered by tens of thousands of citizen complaints about the mess they felt Niagara’s health services were and still are in to take a critical, objective look at a highly criticized ‘hospital improvement plan’  – a plan whipped together in haste four years ago by fired NHS CEO Debbie Sevenpifer and her board of Leon, Suiter and other sychophants, for the restructuring of Niagara’s hospital services  – north, south, east and west. 

There is no reason to believe – at least in my view, given the mess Smith inherited, which was kind of like taking over the wheelhouse of the Titanic after the ship it the iceberg – that he or anyone else could have done much by then with a plan that already saw the literal groundbreaking for a new one-and-a-half-billion-dollar new hospital complex in McGuinty cabinet minister Jim Bradley’s St. Catharines riding. That new hospital, where Bradley and company seemed so happy to enjoy photo opportunities for the local daily papers as Niagara Regional Police had horse riders and SUVs to hold back about a dozen grey-haired ladies from south Niagara wearing yellow shirts, went forward anyway. So what we are left with now is the plan that Kevin Smith has delivered this September 14 to Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews who, unfortunately for people in the central and south end of Niagara who’ve said Bradley never listened to them, is one of his cabinet colleagues.

The plan, not so surprisingly, supports the Sevenpifer/Bradley ‘hospital improvement plan’ or HIP with the sucking north, into Bradley’s St. Catharines riding, most of the acute care services.

But then Smith had the goodness to recommend a new hospital for south Niagara here. It is a pie-in-the-sky recommendation that would not have been necessary if the Niagara Health System and Bradley had listened to hundreds of Niagara doctors and other health-care professionals, and located the new hospital about to be opened in west St. Catharines, along with regional cancer and cardiac centres, closer to the middle of Niagara in the first place.

For those who might want to slam Kevin Smith and a report that goes along with moving most of the acute care services to the new hospital in west St. Catharines, let me ask you this.

Where in frigging hell were you five years ago or even closer, when the Niagara Health System pushed for building the only new hospital complex we are likely to get funding for in decades from now in west St. Catharines, rather than in a more central location in the peninsula? Were in fig were you when doctors across this region had the courage to take out full-page ads in daily newspapers, demanding a more central site for a new health complex for this region? Don’t say that you only woke up now because you were watching hockey or dancing with the stars then, because that will not stand for an answer.

Here is a media release from Kevin Smith and the NHS, followed by a link for the full report.

Final report on NHS complete

Supervisor Dr. Kevin Smith’s final report on the Niagara Health System is complete.

The report has been submitted to the Minister of Health and Long-Term Care for her consideration. It will be the decision of the Minister and the Government on whether to accept the recommendations in the report in whole or in part.

Highlights in Dr. Smith’s final report, after extensive consultation with all stakeholders, include recommendations of a single site in the “South” in the QEW and Lyons Creek area of Niagara; two free-standing Urgent Care Centres in Niagara; and consolidation of inpatient Obstetrics and Pediatrics to a single site (St. Catharines initially and then the new site in the South when built).

View the full report (PDF 1.88 MB).

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