Dr. Chris Carruthers, former Chief of Staff for The Ottawa Hospital, is advocating that all 20 hospitals in the Champlain LHIN merge into one big hospital.
In an Op/Ed published in the Ottawa Citizen last week, Dr. Carruthers makes the usual claims that mergers will bring about more efficient service.
Dr. Carruthers should be aware that it took 15 years to merge these same hospitals’ labs into the Eastern Ontario Regional Lab Association. For all the years of planning and disruption, it likely won’t save any money and could likely cost more in the long term according to the consultants that reviewed the plan.
Oddly enough, offering no real proof the previous Ottawa amalgamation saved anything or achieved any efficiencies, Dr. Carruthers states “some savings are hard to measure, but are real.”
The one thing about money is that it is measureable.
For hospitals that amalgamated in the wake of the 1996-2000 Health Restructing Commission, seldom has the story been positive.
Just ask the citizens of Fort Erie and Port Colborne, who were promised their hospitals would remain intact when they merged with three other hospitals to form the Niagara Health System (NHS). Now both have lost their ERs and are effectively satellite branches offering specialized care for the NHS. About the only thing that has remained is the ‘H’ on the building.
Many smaller communities have felt aggrieved that the larger partner in the merger has benefited at their expense.
The community of Ajax has rallied twice around threats to move key services to the Scarborough Centenary site of the Rouge Valley Health System. The first time they stopped Rouge from taking away obstetrics and paediatrics from the Ajax-Pickering site. The second time they were less successful in losing their inpatient mental health beds to Scarborough.
Lakeridge Health has been notorious for running deficits since amalgamation – that is until it received more than $5 million in new money this year to finally place it in the black.
Headwaters Healthcare was a marriage of the Orangeville Hospital with the Shelburne Hospital. The Shelburne Mayor has complained services have been gradually moved out of the local hospital year-by-year. This year will likely be the last for Shelburne, making Headwaters a one-site hospital again.
Another thing happened with the amalgamation of these hospitals – communities also lost what control they had over them. Most boards of these amalgamated hospitals are now self appointing. It used to be community members could buy a membership and vote on who sat on the local board. This is increasingly disappearing.
When the Headwaters Board decided to close Shelburne, not a single member of that board came from the Shelburne community.
How sensitive would a monster Champlain hospital be to the needs of such communities as Deep River and Winchester? Would they have anybody on the board of an amalgamated hospital?
Dr. Carruthers is now a private health consultant. A big fat merger would likely keep him in business for years to come. For many of the communities, the outcome might be very different.
OPSEU Diablogue 
The “H” is no longer on the Fort Erie site. It is merely an Urgent Care Centre.