A Last Stand Effort To Keep Acute Care Services In South Niagara Hospitals

News Analysis by Doug Draper

“We have to fight this plan,” a charged-up Wayne Gates told more than 80, mostly central and south Niagara residents attending a rally this past January 19, aimed at sending a message to the Niagara Health System and Ontario government, that they don’t want maternity and pediatric services moved out of hospitals in Niagara Falls and Welland.

Niagara Falls, Ontario councillor Wayne Gates speaks at hospital rally with Niagara Falls Mayor Jim Diodati (centre) and Welland Mayor Barry Sharpe at his side. Photo by Doug Draper

These were bold words and, without doubt here, heartfelt ones coming from the Niagara Falls city councillor and one cannot help but wonder if they will lead to any better results than General Custer urging the 200-some-odd soldiers in his regiment to stand their ground and fight with thousands of Sioux warriors swooping down on them.

Indeed, the Niagara Health System, with the full support of the provincial government and its feisty health minister Deb Matthews, shows every sign of following through on its intentions – first outlined in July of 2008 in a controversial ‘hospital improvement plan’ tabled by the NHS’s former CEO Debbie Sevenpifer and her now-long-defunct board – to consolidate most acute care services in the region, including maternity, pediatric and obstetric services – in the new mega hospital Sevenpifer and company insisted on building in the north end of Niagara, in west St. Catharines.

Kevin Smith, a supervisor appointed by the province a year and a half ago to try to mop up the God-awful mess made by Sevenpifer and her appointed board of feather-brained sycophants, has been placed in the position of reviewing the Sevenpifer ‘hospital improvement plan’ after it was too late to possibly build the mega hospital now going in west St. Catharines at a more central site in the region. So he, along with outside experts he has consulted on the cards he has been dealt here, have come to the conclusion that consolidating the services at the new west St. Catharines site makes the most sense.

That was obviously not the view of the more than 80 Niagara residents, along with two of the region’s mayors – Barry Sharpe of Welland and Jim Diodati of Niagara Falls – along with Wainfleet Mayor April Jeffs  and some councillors from Niagara Falls, Welland and Fort Erie who showed up at the January 19 rally. They have concerns about how safe it will be for pregnant moms going into the labour to travel from as far away as Fort Erie and Port Colborne to the only maternity wards that will be left in west St. Catharines.

At the rally, Jillian and Andrew Craig, Niagara Falls residents who are now expecting their second child, showed a video they made of the time it took them, in a test run, to rush from Fort Erie’s town hall to the west St. Catharines hospital site with a mother in labour. As it turned out, it took 49 minutes and that, said Jillian was on a good day when the weather was okay and there weren’t too many traffic obstructions. In a similar test run, it took them 33 minutes to get to the new hospital site from their home, compared to the 11 minutes it took to get to their hometown hospital in Niagara Falls.

Gates read a message he received from Dr. Allison MacTavish, a family doctor in Niagara Falls, who said she assisted in the birth of three babies just this past December were the circumstances were such that the expecting mothers would not have made it to the west St. Catharines hospital on time to address some serious health concerns around those deliveries.

Dr. Rau Sabnavis, a long-time pediatrician in the Welland area, said he and other doctors tried expressing their concerns to the NHS years ago about moving all maternity-related services to Niagara’s north end but he doesn’t think  it’s former CEO and board “ever listened to anything we had to say. … We might as well have been in Nazi Germany,” he added.

Veteran Welland area pediatrician Dr. Rau Sabnavis speaks at rally. Photo by Doug Draper

“Who would you rather trust,” asked Gates during the rally, “your doctors or consultants?”

Diodati said the council in his city of Niagara Falls was told by the NHS, right up to the time that Sevenpifer tabled the health improvement plan, that there would be no consolidation of maternity services in the west St. Catharines hospital. That was even when there was a about a 20 per cent drop in St. Catharines of the 2,500 to 3,000 births per year in Niagara.

If the number of births in St. Catharines was dropping, Diodati asked, why would you want to move all maternity services there? And why would Smith say let’s move all maternity services there until a new hospital is possibly built in the southwest end of his municipality for south Niagara residents in his municipality, when those services might be moved back?

Why move those services more than once, he asked. Why move them when you can leave them in existing hospitals in Niagara Falls and Welland where people need them.

Welland’s mayor, Barry Sharpe, argued that Smith and the NHS should at least grant a six-month hold on moving the services to St. Catharines until a new NHS board is put in place and has time to review it. There was also a call to keep the services in Niagara Falls and Welland, in the long run, to ensure closer access to the services for residents in Niagara’s cental and southern end. And there is a hope that others in central and southern Niagara, including municipal councils and their mayors, will make a last-minute push to preserve maternity-related services in the Niagara Falls and Welland hospitals.

That is all well and good, but allow this reporter who is, quite frankly, getting tired of covering this 12-year-tragedy of NHS shananigans a couple more things.

First, when I read in a story on the Bullet News site that Kevin Smith says this whole issue of consolidating these services has been discussed for 12 years, it makes me want to shake with a little rage.

I mean ‘Dear Dr. Smith, can’t you please just once stop defending Sevenpifer and her former board? There was no 12-year dialogue with the public on this. For the first six years, any discussions around consolidating acute care services were being discussed behind closed doors at the NHS. As a matter of a fact, and as Niagara Falls Mayor Jim Diodati made clear again at the rally, the NHS under Sevenpifer went right on assuring municipal councils and others in Niagara that acute care services at their community hospitals were safe –  right up until the time it released its hospital improvement plant in 2008.

That plan finally made clear what leaked consultant reports to the NHS were recommending in 2002 – that most acute care services, including maternity services, be consolidated in a single hospital.

Of course, had that part of the dialogue gone from internal to external prior to 2008, possibly many more people other than a few like south-end citizen activists Pat Scholfield and Sue Salzer would have joined many NHS doctors back then in rallying for the new hospital to be located more centrally in the region. And that would not have been good for Sevenpifer and company, because they wanted to make sure the new hospital was located in a Liberal government riding in St. Catharines so that they would receive that government’s blessings for that and every other awful decision they made.

Finally, where were all of the people who are now so upset about services being consolidated in one new NHS hospital prior to the hospital improvement plan’s release in 2008?

Information about the NHS’s leaked reports on consolidation was leaked to the media before that time and I was one of the reporters who wrote stories on that information. I, along with some of my journalism colleagues, was publishing this information in Niagara This Week at the time. Why weren’t there more people paying attention?

 Now it is almost too late and, quite frankly, I am beginning to have less and less sympathy for people who are just waking up and getting upset now.

Your job, as a citizen in a democracy, is to pay attention – to inform yourselves and be engages in government decisions that affect the quality of life in your community. If you don’t exercise that responsibility or wait until the last minute, perhaps you only have yourselves to blame.

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