Frustration and hope for health-care services

How is the delivery of health care in Niagara doing?

There are two answers to that question, and they vary depending on the angle you look from.

Up close, the same frustrations remain — most times of day, patients who go to either a hospital emergency department or one of the urgent-care centres face long waits.

On Wednesday evening, for example, wait times ranged from two and a half hours at the Niagara Falls hospital ER to three hours everywhere else.

That leaves few options for anyone shopping for the shortest stay for treatment, but on the bright side it can get worse and often does.

Niagara still needs more doctors, as we heard last week from Niagara Region Public Health physician recruitment and retention specialist Jill Croteau.

She said Welland, with about 55,000 residents, needs another 17 family doctors to meet local needs. A year ago, Croteau reported Niagara region as a whole needs 345 family doctors who are taking patients, but it had only 255, a shortfall of 90 MDs.

Blame it on a lot of factors: Niagara has a greater share of older people than most other parts of Ontario, including family doctors; the fact every municipality is competing for more doctors; the health system is still recovering from the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Niagara’s not in a bubble, and these issues persist to varying degrees across Ontario. Not to make light of them — health care is serious business — but that’s the way it is, and it will take time to correct the problems.

Take a step back, though, to see the bigger picture and there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic that the condition of Niagara’s health care is improving.

The clearest sign of that is happening at the intersection of Biggar and Montrose roads in Niagara Falls.

Finally, the heavy machinery is out and the site is being prepared to house the new south Niagara hospital with a projected 2028 opening date.

At approximately 1.3 million square feet in size and with numerous state-of-the-art features, it’s expected to provide 469 beds (30 for critical care, 170 for complex care and 269 for surgical patients).

At the other end of Niagara, construction continues on the new West Niagara hospital for residents in the region’s west end. It is expected to be ready for occupancy in two years.

This week, a groundbreaking was held to start work on a new 10-bed Hospice Niagara site being built in Welland through an expansion of Foyer Richelieu.

Hospice Niagara will also open a 10-bed facility in Fort Erie, at the site of the new Niagara Region nursing home that will replace the aging Gilmore Lodge.

When it’s all done, that will boost Hospice Niagara’s complement of beds to 30 from its current 10. Providing a place for terminally ill people to spend their final days in comfort is important; health care is cradle to grave.

Also this week, Niagara Health was able to launch a new program that will make it a national leader in hospital-based medical research, led by Dr. Jennifer Tsang and paid for through a $4-million donation by the McCall MacBain Foundation.

The idea is to introduce more research programs in local hospitals, where the hard work of health care really happens.

As an example, Tsang pointed to the research hospitals carried out on COVID-19 while the virus continued to spread and mutate, “resulting in real-time and practice-changing work that led to many high-impact publications.”

The view of local health care from 30,000 feet looks promising; closer up, many frustrations remain.

That’s no consolation to people who need to see a doctor right now, but it does point to a better future.