In early July, the NHS put out an appeal for public input into the "hospital improvement plan" that they have been required to produce for the local LHIN. The deadline for suggestions was midnight July 14, while the plan, in its completed form, had to be handed over on the 15th. Given the 11th-hour call for public input, does anyone actually believe any of their suggestions or comments made any impact whatsoever on the plan? This was obviously another of the NHS' thinly veiled PR gimmicks in their attempts to attain public support through cheap PR tricks rather than through improvement of health care services.

The management of the NHS frankly scares me. They have our access to health care in their hands, yet they are not in any way accountable to the people of Niagara or the politicians. It seems that the LHIN is interested only in holding them responsible for the budget, which they consistently fail at. Don't you wish you could do a crap job and still collect a large paycheque?

The best example of a lack of accountability to the public is the fiasco of the location of the new hospital. When I asked Dr. Bill Shragge (chief of staff) why the new hospital wasn't being built in a central location, he said, "because this is a hospital for the people of St. Catharines, not for all of Niagara." Really? The REGIONAL cancer centre, the cardiac catheterization lab and many other regional services will be located at this hospital. Besides, even the people of St. Catharines don't seem to be very happy with the choice of location. The location is so inappropriate, with no room for future expansion, that one wonders if there are any ulterior motives involved. Unfortunately, we will never know the reasons for the choice of location, because like most NHS plans and decisions, it is shrouded in fog. After all, the NHS staff are not accountable to the people of Niagara, so they don't need to explain anything to us. Regionalization of health care has not been kind to the people of south Niagara. It has cost us dearly so that we can rescue the overspent budgets in St. Catharines and Niagara Falls. The NHS is too large and it has destroyed access to services for us in south Niagara.

A new division of responsibility is our only hope; a South Niagara Health System. The NHS has control of our tax dollars for health care and don't care about us down here. They have lied to us countless times. They have no respect for us and our needs. Clearly, lest this overpaid collection of poorly chosen administrators continue to drag down the standard of health care in Niagara, we must demand some kind of accountability from them. We deserve it. The only hope we have at that is to bombard our politicians all three levels with demands for that, accountability.

Dr. Christian Proulx, Port Colborne