Tag Archives: West Lincoln Memorial Hospital

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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Queen’s Park: Buildings matter. Health care delivery? Not so much.

Posted on April 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

The next election appears to be set up to be fought over the bricks and mortars of health care, and not the quality of the system itself.

Liberals are using robocalls in Halton to urge constituents to call their MPP and urge her to vote for the provincial budget lest the $300 million redevelopment of Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital be placed in jeopardy.

The Liberals felt no compulsion about doing the same around Grimsby’s West Lincoln Memorial hospital redevelopment or five other projects that were taken off the table in the same provincial budget. Five of six of these projects are in provincial Tory ridings.

“Their decisions are not about health care. Their decisions about what hospitals to fund have become part of a political game,” PC leader Tim Hudak told the Hamilton Spectator.

According to the Spectator, Burlington MPP Jane McKenna received more than 1,000 calls to her office as a result of robocalling that started Monday.

While hospitals are telling us about impending layoffs due to a base budget freeze, at Queen’s Park the real battle is over the buildings, not the care delivered in those buildings.

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Hospital quality issues picked out from the fast moving stream

Posted on April 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

We sometimes get asked about how we come up with stories for the Diablogue? For us, it’s not a matter of finding stories, but prioritizing material culled from a fast-moving stream.

Last week we focussed on the outrageous decision by Canadian Blood Services to increase imports of American-sourced plasma products while closing the last dedicated Canadian plasma donor clinic in Thunder Bay.

However, there are many issues out there, and only limited BLOG time for us. Here’s just a taste of some of the stories we missed last week:

Part of the fallout from the provincial budget is the decision to postpone a number of capital projects, including new hospitals. Nowhere is this being more felt that in Grimsby, where the community is upset that the new $138.8 million rebuild of the West Lincoln Memorial Hospital has been put on the shelf. The “Rallying for WLMH Committee” has called for a “massive rally” May 2nd. When the hospital faced closure in 1997, more than 7,000 people came out in a similar planned rally.

A new CIHI (Canadian Institute for Health Information) report raised eyebrows when Lakeridge Health and the University Health Network came out at the bottom of list of GTA hospitals. Lakeridge (with sites in Oshawa, Port Perry, Bowmanville and Whitby) pointed out that according to CIHI data, they were doing better than the provincial average on six of seven clinical performance indicators. That includes 80 per cent better than the provincial average when it comes to readmission after hip replacement surgery, and 30 per cent better on knee replacement surgery. An on-line tool that CIHI developed to rate hospitals crashed after it was swamped with users following a front page story in the Toronto Star.

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