Urgent-care centre key to help patients

The Ontario Health Coalition recently held a series of meetings across the province inviting members of the public to talk about experiences they or loved ones may have had with a hospital emergency visit or being an in-patient.

The coalition wanted to hear people’s stories, good or bad. There were not a lot of good news stories at the Windsor meeting.

The two Windsor hospitals became one entity in October 2013 under the administration of Windsor Regional Hospital. At the time, local residents were assured that there would be no negative impact on hospital services as a result of the merger.

Since then, however, there have been reductions in nursing staff and bed closures. Back then, four-hour waits in the emergency rooms had become a common occurrence at both hospital locations. Now, we are told that patients are waiting in excess of 10 hours before being assessed. That is unacceptable and dangerous.

The layoffs and bed closures were due to budget consideration, not patient care need. During that same period of time in a discussion about wait times, Dr. Gary Ing said that we needed to invest in public health care to increase capacity and do a better job of prioritizing patient needs. He was absolutely right, but we are going in the opposite direction.

What we should be doing is building the urgent care centre at the old Grace Hospital site now, not several years from now.

In the meantime, the hospital ought to rehire laid-off nursing staff and open beds to the point that we have sufficient capacity and staff resources to provide patients with the care they need and deserve in a timely fashion.

We can and must do better. That, I believe, can be accomplished by providing appropriate resources within the current facilities. Ken Brown, Windsor