Doug Draper

Niagara residents have had a history of wearing a passion for protecting their hospitals on their chest. And why shouldn't they?

Unlike, let's say, a new ice rink or soccer field, as important as they may be to the vitality of a community, access to a well-serviced hospital can quite literally mean the difference between life and death for any one of us who, at a moment's notice, could find ourselves in need of critical care. Little wonder then that any plan to close a hospital or downsize its services, from obstetrics and emergency services to general surgery, is often met with fury unless people can be convinced that the plan makes sense, not just from both a financial point of view, but from the view of continuing to provide the best health care possible to the communities at stake.

Look back 11 or 12 years ago, when a provincially created Niagara Hospital Restructuring Committee faced such fierce opposition to recommendations to close some of the region's hospitals and centralize services in others. It hired plainclothes police to help keep order at public meetings it held in such otherwise civil places in Port Colborne, Lincoln and Niagara-on-the-Lake. At the end of it all, public outrage at the committee's recommendations was so forceful, that both they and the committee were iced.

Now this past week we have the Niagara Health System, another creation of the province, tabling yet another set of recommendations for downsizing services at four of the six hospitals under NHS's jurisdiction, including hospital sites in Niagara Falls, Welland, Fort Erie and Port Colborne, under the guise of what it calls a Hospital Improvement Plan.

At the same time, the plan calls for consolidating or centralizing (and I repeat that second word borrowed from the NHS's talking points quite advisedly) such vital services as birthing babies and other obstetrical services, pediatrics, gynecology, cancer treatment, and short- and long-term mental health, in a spanking new, state-of-the-art hospital complex it still insists on building on abandoned farmland somewhere between the vineyards of Lincoln and a traffic clogged maze of strip malls and big box stores on the western fringes St. Catharines. "Oh, baby! Health plan delivers for Garden City," ran a headline last week in a St. Catharines daily newspaper that has more often come across like a public relations agent for the NHS since it announced its selection of the west St. Catharines site for the new hospital some five years ago.

That newspaper's panting over the possibility of the Garden City becoming "the baby capital of Niagara" notwithstanding, what the rest of us ought to remember is that this is the same NHS that, almost every time groups of doctors in our health system or others put forth a case for a more centrally located regional or "super" hospital for Niagara, responds with an out-worn line that it is committed, instead, to "community-based hospitals."

"The NHS is dedicated to strengthening all of our region's community hospitals so that patients can continue to receive care as close to home as possible," stressed the NHS in one handout it circulated in May of 2004. "Our region's community-based hospitals would be threatened if we had a so-called super hospital in the region."

At the same time it was offering those assurances, sources inside the NHS can tell you -- and, indeed, tried to warn our regional and provincial politicians -- that this organization had already been carrying out internal discussions to consolidate obstetrics and other key services in fewer of Niagara's hospitals.

It was only a few months back, when another provincial organization, the Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant Local Health Integration Network, directed the NHS to make public its plans for Niagara's hospital, that it was finally forced to come clean.

Now we know what many of the region's doctors and other health professionals suspected for some time: that at the end of the day, Niagara's community based system of hospitals is not economically sustainable (the NHS is now carrying a $17.9 million debt) and that the new hospital, expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, will slowly but surely become our regional hospital while the others all but whither and die.

Given that, it begs the question once again. Why not locate this new complex in a more central site in Niagara, where every resident has more equal access to it?

It isn't too late to demand that. But there isn't much time. Contact your municipal and regional councillors and your members of provincial parliament to make your feelings known.

There is nothing less than the future of our health-care system in Niagara at stake.

Doug Draper can be reached at ddraper@niagarathisweek.com.