Foundations sound alarm over fate of MUHC
Three days after Health Minister Gaétan Barrette declared that the beleaguered McGill University Health Centre needs to be “stabilized,” the MUHC’s foundations released a strongly worded statement on Thursday warning that “anxiety is spreading across our community” over the fate of the English-language hospital network.
“Over the past few months, public statements were made that lead us to believe that minister Barrette is considering significant structural changes to the MUHC network in order to solve our hospitals’ challenges,” reads the statement, alluding to mega merger proposals.
“Our foundations are open to long-term solutions,” the statement adds. “However, we fear that all imposed structural changes to our hospital network, without meaningful prior dialogue with our community, would do nothing to address our current financing needs, nor contribute to lasting solutions to our problems.”
The statement signals a mobilization by the MUHC community to fight proposals to fold the five hospital network within a larger “conglomerate,” a word that Barrette used for the first time in a radio interview on Tuesday on the Aaron Rand Show on CJAD.
The MUHC foundations, which have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for research and medical equipment, are sounding the alarm over the “catastrophic impact” that Barrette’s bed-funding cutbacks have had on “surgeries and on access to quality health care.”
Barrette wasn’t immediately available to respond to the statement, which was released at 3:30 p.m. In extensive comments he made about the MUHC on Tuesday, Barrette denied that it’s underfunded and he accused its administration and senior physicians of releasing incorrect information to the public.
“They are viewing wrongly that they are underfunded,” Barrette said. “They are not.”
Barrette has said previously that there’s a “a problem in terms of leadership at the MUHC and we are addressing that issue,” raising concerns that the Health Department might place it under trusteeship, fold it within a larger network or parachute someone from the government to oversee it.
MUHC officials have said they’ve had to make tens of millions of dollars in budget cuts in the past few years, and the government is now financing the hospital network based on an 85 per cent bed occupancy rate.
As a result, the MUHC — which runs the Montreal General, Montreal Neurological, Montreal Children’s, Royal Victoria and Lachine hospitals — has been forced to cancel at least 1,000 surgeries and close beds.
The seven foundations that represent the MUHC are calling for an urgent meeting with Barrette to “re-establish the facts” and “identify long-term solutions.”