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Monday,
October 15, 2012
Open letter to Premier Dalton McGuinty and cabinet:
Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC), with 375 beds, is chronically congested because of continuous misuse of an average of 45 beds. They are occupied by homeless people who have completed their acute care procedures but are not provided with satisfactory alternative accommodations. The situation has developed over recent decades while our city councils, and the successive Ontario ministries of health, neglected the renovation and replacement of nursing homes and homes for long-term care patients. These accommodations have become so dilapidated many dischargeable homeless patients remain in TBRHSC and create a crippling bed shortage. The consequences of the bed shortage include: 1. Long wait times, such as 6-8 months for admission to a local surgical ward for a simple hernia operation, with eleven qualified surgeons in town; 2. Sick and elderly patients being sent to other Ontario cities for surgery and other treatments which could be performed in Thunder Bay if we had sufficient acceptable Alternate Level of Care (ALC) and Long-term Care (LTC) accommodations to free up our hospital beds; 3. Local surgeons are taking their patients to regional towns where they can access operating rooms and have beds to back them up; 4. Acute-care patients are frequently consigned to spend days and nights in noisy corridors where they suffer sleep privation and disturbances which are not conducive to relief of pain and anxiety nor to speedy recoveries; 5. Ambulances lined up at our emergency entrance because there are no places for their passengers in the hospital. Your Ministry of Health’s North West Local Health Integration Network (NWLHIN) has been here since 2006 and initiated different programs to accommodate the ALC and LTC people. However, the congestion at TBRHSC has not substantially improved. People of Thunder Bay still must live or die with some aspects of Third-World health care or leave town for treatment. The numbers of inappropriate TBRHSC residents peaked at about 87 in September, 2010, 70 in February, 2012 and 70 in September, 2012. We have been using 45 as the average number but it’s appearing closer to 50. Mr. Premier, you visited Thunder Bay in May. You are quoted in our Chronicle-Journal of May 2 as saying, “Even in these difficult economic times, we will maintain . . . A very active infrastructure plan. Our commitment is to spend about $35 billion over the next three years.” Mr. Premier, we expect our October 2012 petitions will show our citizens in Thunder Bay want $50 million spent to build Harmony Hall. Call it “social infrastructure.” A decade ago our taxpayers supported the construction of what has become a quarter-billion-dollar acute care hospital. It doesn’t work at all well now. It’s a victim of indifference and penny-pinching and it needs your help. We propose our city and your government must team-up and build Harmony Hall, a 100-bed, or greater, transition house dedicated to taking all the homeless dischargeable patients from TBRHSC and sheltering them only until they can be accommodated in suitable homes. We suspect Harmony Hall may cost more than $50 million but that depends on how and where it is built. The cost will be determined by its size, its quality of construction, its location and how it is equipped. The good news is Harmony Hall will pay for itself in a few years out of savings at TBRHSC. The explanation follows. • The website of the ministry’s Community Care Access Centre indicates the daily average, province-wide cost of keeping a person in “long-stay basic accommodations” is about $55 per person per day or $20,000 per year. • The cost of keeping ALC and LTC people in TBRHSC is $1,000 per person per day or $365,000 per year — a waste of $345,000 per person per year. • Forty-five ALC and LTC residents in TBRHSC are wasting $15,525,000 per year and that’s enough to amortize the cost of a $50-million Harmony Hall in three to four years. When the hall is paid for we will have $15 million per year to put into proper long-term care facilities for the region and keep our acute care hospital performing as it should. It will be sometime in November before our petitions can be presented to the legislature but we can provide you with interim reports while the petitions are counted and prepared for submission. Cec Cranton Chairman, Friends of Our Regional Hospital Thunder Bay | ||||||
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