Emergency room faces uncertain future
Local MLAs fear Northside General ER won’t reopen after summer closure
Northside-Westmount MLA Eddie Orrell fears a scheduled summer closure at the Northside General Hospital emergency department could mark the end of the service in North Sydney.
In an advertisement in the Cape Breton Post on Saturday, the Nova Scotia Health Authority announced the summer closure of the hospital’s ER.
The closure began on Saturday and will run until after Labour Day. It’s scheduled to reopen on Sept. 4 at 8 a.m.
“We’ve had summer closures before, but with the recent announcement of the emergency room going to be closing, my biggest fear is that this is not going to be a sum- mer closure, it’s going to be a complete closure, never to reopen again,” said Orrell in a telephone interview on Monday.
“The government has no value in the Northside General Hospital, which I think is completely wrong, but I think this is just the start.”
In June, the province announced plans to close the Northside General Hospital, as well as the New Waterford Consolidated Hospital, as part of plans to “reshape and revitalize” Cape Breton’s healthcare system.
The new plan will include building new community health centres and long-term care facilities to replace the Northside and New Waterford hospitals. A new laundry centre to replace aging equipment will be built in North Sydney to serve health-care facilities in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality.
The redevelopment plan will also include expanding the emergency department at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital, doubling the size of the regional hospital’s cancer centre, as well as renovating and revitalizing the emergency department in Glace Bay.
Launching a communitybased paramedic program in the municipality where paramedics visit homes and do followup visits after hospital discharge, reducing the trips to the emergency department, is also part of the new plan.
However, there’s no direct indication that the summer closure for a lengthy period of time has any connection to last month’s announcement.
“People are really upset about this — although this (closure) is something that’s happened over the last number
of years, I don’t think it’s been this long,” said Orrell.
“There are people who don’t have family doctors and now they’re not going to have an emergency room to even go to on a short time of the day.”
On Monday, the only emergency department open in industrial Cape Breton was the Cape Breton Regional Hospital, which is the main referral and trauma centre on the island and cannot close.
Along with Northside General, the New Waterford and Glace Bay hospitals were also closed on Monday.
Cape Breton Centre MLA Tammy Martin believes the closures are “ridiculous.”
“Every week we see announcements in the paper where the emergency rooms are closing for three, four and five days at a time,” said Martin. “Now here we are with the closure of the Northside emergency room until after Labour Day.”
“Not unlike New Waterford
last summer, they (the government) closed the mobile care team and told us at the end of every month that they would look at reopening it and it ended up disappearing, so that’s my fear with the Northside ER.”
Northside General Hospital opened in 1954, serving the communities of North Sydney, Sydney Mines and surrounding area.
In total, the hospital has 271 staff members. A nurse practitioner and 14 family physicians also serve the hospital’s coverage area.
Northside General currently has 45 acute care beds, 14 licensed transitional long-term care beds as well as 22 beds on Taigh Solas, a licensed community long-term care unit.
Martin considers the closure in North Sydney as “putting lives at risk.”
“People depend on their emergency room, they depend on local and available care and right now they don’t have that,” Martin said.
“I guess you have to be a little psychic — if you think you’re going to get sick, you should go somewhere else before something drastic happens.”
Brett MacDougall, the director of operations for NSHA’s eastern zone, was in meetings Monday and was not immediately available for comment on the Northside closure.
However, Kristen Lipscombe, spokesperson for the health authority, said in an email statement that scheduled closures are not unusual and are part of regular practice that results in some services temporarily closing during peak vacation times including Christmas, March break and the summer months.
“The summer months are prime vacation times and add to our challenge,” said Lipscombe. “Scheduled closures help some staff and physicians take their vacation. Our staff and physicians work very hard and, in many cases, they are stretched to their limit — they need and deserve a break.”
“No one takes any pleasure in having emergency department closures, whether they are scheduled or temporary — we realize that it is confusing and frustrating for some people in the community.”
Lipscombe confirmed recruitment efforts for doctors are ongoing.
“We have physicians interested in practising in Cape Breton and we are working with those candidates to fill vacant positions as soon as possible,” she said.
With questions still left unanswered about the new health-care plan for Cape Breton, Orrell said he’s asked Premier Stephen McNeil and Minister of Health and Wellness Randy Delorey to come to Cape Breton to explain the plan in further detail.
“Please, Mr. Premier, come down and tell us what the plan is — send the health minister and let him speak, the last time he came to Cape Breton to announce the closures he never spoke,” said Orrell.
“Come down and ease the people’s minds about what the plan is and reinsure us that the emergency department is going to remain open until at least the construction and the other plans are done — people on the Northside deserve that care as much as anybody else.”