Tag Archives: South Grey Bruce Health Centre

Hospital Cuts: Barrett could be hero or goat depending on the future of Chesley’s Restorative Care Unit

Posted on January 27, 2015 | Leave a comment
There was standing room only in Elmwood last Friday as residents rallied to save the Restorative Care Unit at the Chesley hospital.

There was standing room only in Elmwood last Friday as residents rallied to save the Restorative Care Unit at the Chesley hospital.

Michael Barrett has a problem.

The CEO of the South West Local Health Integration Network (SW LHIN) now has the ball in his court as local support has been building to save the restorative care unit at the Chesley Hospital, one of four small sites that make up the South Grey Bruce Health Centre (SGBHC).

Barrett’s LHIN initially funded the 10-bed unit on a trial basis three years ago. The problem is the LHIN had no plan in place should the trial turn out to be a runaway success. There was no funding for year two or beyond. That would be the hospital’s problem.

This may not be as odd as it sounds. The LHINs frequently incubate new projects through one-time funding. Some don’t pan out. Others do. In normal circumstances, new money is often found to keep the successful high-performing programs going, but these are far from normal times.

The restorative care unit at Chesley was successful and everybody knew it. When the hospital announced it didn’t have $800,000 to keep the program running past the end of April, the community quickly rallied. The media were filled with testimonies of how the lives of patients were turned around with a few weeks of restorative care at the hospital.

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Transformation or austerity? Hospitals lose further capacity in new round of cuts

Posted on December 12, 2014 | Leave a comment
Photograph of large Kathleen Wynne puppet at the November rally against privatization of hospital services.

Protest last month over plans to contract hospital services to private clinics. Competitions have not been announced, but hospitals are cutting diagnostic and lab jobs, suggesting the government may be trying to achieve the same aim by stealth.

In October a Whitby nursing home experienced a major fire displacing more than 250 residents.

About 80 of those residents found temporary accommodation in area hospitals. Many are still there for lack of available alternative long term care spaces in the community. It’s remarkable the public hospitals were able to accommodate this many residents given the limited availability of beds.

Hospitals are presently in the third year of a base funding freeze. The Ontario government has maintained that the freeze is part of their overall health care transformation plan, but the Whitby experience would suggest that there is increasingly less flexibility due to funding shortfalls across the entire system. In another year or two how many beds will be available under a similar emergency?

The previous Auditor General of Ontario warned in 2011 that restraining annual health care funding increases to a proposed 3.6 per cent would lead to either service cuts or rising deficits. Instead we have seen health care funding increases limited even further to roughly 2 per cent.

In recent weeks a number of hospitals have been meeting with their respective unions to give notice of layoffs in the coming year. This is starting to become an annual holiday season tradition worthy of a Charles Dickens novel.

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Integration process missing from new round of hospital cuts

Posted on March 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

Local Health Integration Networks were purportedly created to bring health care planning, integration, accountability, and funding closer to the 14 regions they serve. A key role for the LHINs was to engage their regional communities in this process. The Ministry of Health and Long Term Care was supposed to set the strategic directions, and the LHINs were supposed to operationalize them within the context of regional planning.

While the Health Minister has mused about further empowering the LHINs, recent signs suggest that perhaps the opposite is taking place.

The South Bruce Grey Health Centre is a case in point. Comprised of four small hospitals working under one umbrella, the Ministry of Health is not exempting SBGHC from implementation of the new funding formula. Small hospitals were supposed to be excluded from a funding system that was becoming far more reliant on volumes that rural communities could not possibly muster. By sharing resources, the four small rural hospitals that operate as SBGHC are over the budgetary threshold for exemption. SBGHC has an operating budget of $43 million – a pittance compared to some of Ontario’s billion dollar urban behemoths like The Ottawa Hospital or Hamilton Health Sciences.

SBGHC took their case to the South West LHIN and they agreed implementation of the formula on this hospital would be unfair. It would also throw SBGHC $700,000 further in debt next year if they failed to cut needed services. Continue reading →

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Hospital Food: Will evidence and accountability be the end of rethermalized food?

Posted on May 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

The food served in hospital may be directly linked to chances of survival for critically ill patients according to Dr. Daren Heyland, a staff physician at Kingston General Hospital.

Heyland and his research team has just received a grant from the U.S. National Institute of Health to continue research into meeting the nutrition needs of high risk, critically ill patients. According to release from Queen’s University, such a grant to a Canadian researcher is rare.

“The optimal amount of energy and protein given to a critically ill patient remains unclear but CERU’s (Queen’s University Clinical Evaluation Research Unit) review of current intensive care unit nutrition practice shows over recent years the amount of energy and protein delivered to critically ill patients is too low,” the release states (emphasis added).

There’s no question that every time you process food, it loses much of its nutritional value.

When a hospital converts from fresh to rethermalized food service, the patient meals lose more nutrition in the cooking, freezing, and reheating process. This is a scientific fact.

The proteins that patients need are altered in the process, or what some call “denaturing.” According to one source, “protein molecules are long chains of 100 or more amino acids all linked together forming a coil called an alpha helix. When a protein is stressed, as it is when it is heated or cooked, it begins to uncoil and changes, losing or altering some of its properties.”

Earlier this year OPSEU took advantage of the freedom of information process to seek food costs at South Bruce Grey Health Centre (SBGHC).

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Duncan calls for new $1.8 billion Windsor hospital after cancelling hospital projects in other communities

Posted on April 23, 2012 | 4 comments

While cancelling the new $136.8 million West Lincoln Memorial Hospital in Grimsby, along with cuts to five other hospital projects across the province, Finance Minister Dwight Duncan announced a task force to look at building a new $1.5 billion regional hospital in his Windsor constituency.

The new super hospital would replace both Windsor Regional Hospital and Windsor Hotel Dieu. This is even though both hospitals have undergone recent additions, including a $91.6 million mental health facility at WRH and an $80 million cardiac care expansion at Hotel Dieu. Last year the government also approved a $60 million expansion of WRH’s ER and laboratory facilities – a project that wasn’t shelved as part of the McGuinty austerity budget.

Despite more than $230 million in new builds at the two hospitals – almost twice what it would cost to rebuild West Lincoln, Duncan estimates the Windsor hospitals will require another $1.8 billion in new capital projects to keep the two hospitals operating.

David Musyj, CEO of Windsor Regional, says both the buildings and the site are physically inadequate for what’s needed in the near future.

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