From Doug Draper, Niagara At Large
A group of Niagara, Ontario area citizens working under the banner ‘The Save The Welland Hospital Campaign’ will be hosting a public meeting Sunday, January 11th on exactly that subject – save what is left of the Welland Hospital.
Future of Welland hospital and accessible acute care hospital services for south Niagara resiidents hang in balance.
This public meeting, described by the group as an “information meeting to update the public on the work and exciting activities and events developed by our five committees,” will begin at 2 p.m. in the community room of Welland City Hall on East Main Street in that same city, and for anyone in Welland or any other south Niagara municipality, from Wainfleet and Port Colborne, to Fort Erie and southern reaches of Niagara Falls, it would be a good idea to attend this meeting and to get more engaged in the debate over where hospital services in the region’s southern tier should go over the next 50 or more years.
And when I say get engaged, that means getting far more actively interested than south Niagara residents were a decade ago when the then-Niagara Health System, a recently formed amalgamation of Niagara’s hospitals administered by Debbie Sevenpifer at the time, and a provincial government of then-premier Dalton McGunity said yes to building a super hospital in the region’s northern reaches, on a former tract of farmland in west St. Catharine’s.
Unfortunately, too many people in south Niagara, along with politicians up to and including Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath, were into this idea of saving aging local hospitals in Port Colborne and Fort Erie rather than joining numerous doctors and others in Niagara in pressuring the province to build that super hospital somewhere in the middle of the region.
So now we have the spanking new super hospital in north Niagara and a dubious plan to build a so-called south Niagara hospital in Niagara Falls at cost of several more hundreds of millions of dollars, if it is built at all.
The question that is screaming to be asked of the province and of Niagara’s regional government is this. Would it not be better to spend that money, or a portion of that money, on expanding and upgrading the existing acute care facilities at the Niagara Falls and Welland hospitals for the 21st century.
Both levels of government ought to be put on the hot seat over this since they went along with the hair-brain plan of the former Niagara Health System/Sevenpifer board to locate a billion-dollar super hospital for Niagara in the north end rather than somewhere in the centre of the region. All this was okayed despite regional government studies and a grow-south policy that forecasts growing numbers of people living and working in the southern tier over the next 20 to 40 years.
So renewed public pressure should be placed on the provincial and regional governments to do what they should have done in the first place – ensure fair and timely access to 21st century acute-care hospital services to all of Niagara’s residents, including those in the southern tier.
(NOW IT IS YOUR TURN. Niagara At Large encourages you to share your views on this post. A reminder that we only post comments by individuals who share their first and last name with them.)
Niagara At Large 
The new St. Catharines Hospital was built at a time when St. Catharines wanted a new hospital and the rest of the Niagara Region opposed a Regional Hospital. It is less expensive to install services in a new site than in existing sites. As a result the St. Catharines Hospital was built not only to provide local services but regional services as well. On the positive side services for which we had to go to Hamilton were now available in the Region. On the negative side, for a large segment of the population within the Region access to these regional services is not readily accessible _ thus the push for a “central” regional hospital. I understand the original site for the proposed Regional Hospital is no longer available or too close to the new St. Catharines Hospital.
The proposed Niagara Falls site for the Regional Hospital addresses the needs of a large portion of the population but ignores a large segment of the area it is intended to serve.
The lack of vision of previous regional politicians has created this dilemma for finding a suitable location for the proposed regional hospital. In 2008, at a meeting to discuss the new St. Catharines Hospital I was told that the other hospitals would have to remain open because there were under 400 beds in the new hospital. Are these hospitals remaining open? NO!
Rather than continue to invite private enterprise to provide services which come with an Administrative Fee the Province, HNHB-LHIN, and NHS should be causing these enterprises to operate within the hospitals _ eliminate the Administrative Fee. In this way, the money would continue to go into the hospitals. As things stand now, private enterprises are tak9ng money from the hospitals.
The Government and LHINs are forcing hospitals to run a deficit. Because the hospitals are in a deficit position the ‘powers that be’ claim they cannot continue to run the hospital and close it down. Private enterprises come to the rescue _ at a price. We pay private enterprises $1.00 for, I suspect, anywhere from $0.50 to $0.80 of service.
Is the Federal Government meeting its responsibility to provide the necessary funds for Canadian Medicare? If the Federal Government steps up to the plate to meet its obligation, the Ontario Government would be in a better position to meet its responsibility and not continually have to be bailed out be private enterprise at our expense.
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It seemed that peoples in the Southern tier, peoples who payed for and built “THEIR” own hospitals were completely ignored from the consultation process Yes there were meetings….. BUT…. “BY INVITATION ONLY” and this did not include the stakeholders, THE PEOPLE. These home built hospital operated in the “BLACK” and did not ask to be merged into a system (The NHS) where the ADMINISTRATION costs are draining the blood from the health care of the people. The Sunshine list is evidence of EMPIRE BUILDING where the focus is on questionable so called “P3 Centers of Excellences” rather than on actual people care. There are countless accounts of people being abused and neglected by the NHS administrative system and there are many people in South Niagara who will venture to Hamilton or Toronto to have surgery…I, myself had hip surgery in Hamilton and a bone graft in Toronto because I do not trust the Niagara Health System and the EMPIRE BUILT by the over paid Administration. I along with many others fought to stop the NHS but We found it was impossible to fight a Corporate Government bent on Privatization.
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This has been a fiasco from day one.
-I drove from my home in Fort Erie to the new regional hospital on a sunny, warm day & it took me 45 to 50 minutes at 100kph with no traffic tie ups.
-The new hospital has fewer beds than the ones they closed.
-It’s far from central, especially being in an area prone to terrible weather.
-There isn’t even enough parking for staff.
-I am unaware of a massive influx of new specialists to new wonder facility as we were told would occur.
-Welland is central for many areas including Port Colborne, Fort Erie, Wainfleet, Thorold & most of the southern peninsula. Quick! Better close it down.
-Niagara Falls leaves some of these areas out of luck.
-Private partnerships are far more costly to the public. It takes decades for them to be paid off with exorbitant interest & by then they’re obsolete but the investors need plastic surgeons to wipe the smiles off their faces.
-Lovely lobby which serves absolutely no practical purpose.
We could go on & on with the stupidity being displayed by the powers that be.
Try getting rid of 75% of the administration (who don’t administrate anyway but rather hire expensive consultants to do their jobs) & the budget might have a surplus. Some of these clowns get paid more than the PM.
I guess the future of health care in Canada will mimic the US where procedures cost from 2 to10 times what they cost here & people will lose their homes. If you want to see how shocking the costs are in the US vs Canada, read “The Health Care Racket” by Ralph Nader. A real eye opener.
Of course our politicians are pursued by insurance company lobbyists like foxes are by the hounds. Did you ever hear of an insurance company going broke?
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