IT’S TIME TO BUILD NEW HOSPITAL

Facility will provide better health care, and surely that’s the key consideration

Build it.

Our existing acute-care hospital is divided between two sites, crumbling and can’t accommodate the latest in care.

The Local Planning Appeal Tribunal, an independent third party, has heard the appeal of the controversial location of the planned new hospital and dismissed it.

It’s time to build the new hospital.

All sides in this bitter dispute — the city, new hospital steering committee and opponents of the location — care about the future of Windsor and have legitimate concerns. And all sides have made mistakes.

Despite myriad presentations, public meetings, surveys, a callin radio show and a “fairness adviser,” the site selection committee missed something key.

It never considered the impact of the new hospital’s location on the city.

Strictly speaking, its job was to plan for the best hospital. But when you’re a critical institution and the city’s second largest employer, drawing many ancillary services, you can’t disregard your impact on urban life. That’s why the city wanted university and college campuses downtown — because they would stimulate the core.

Citizens for an Accountable Megahospital Planning Process, which appealed the planned location on County Road 42, was rightly concerned about sprawl that could hollow out the core and make the hospital less accessible.

But we’re getting one hospital for the city and county, and the population is almost evenly divided. The county will pay 46 per cent of the local share. Yet CAMPP dismissed the county.

Here’s the worrisome reality now. Patients are transferred back and forth between two sites for care. Doctors scramble between two sites.

Parts of both sites are more than a century old, with leaky roofs, cracked pipes. Something’s always breaking — like the system that sterilizes surgical instruments. We spend millions fixing stuff that could go to actual care.

The new $3.5-million PET/CT scanner is in a trailer.

The new hospital would provide better care, period — more private rooms to control infection, a state-of-the-art cardiac catheterization lab. It would help attract top professionals and expand research. Not only that, the plan includes integrating mental health at Hotel-dieu Grace Healthcare, creating one place for all patients needing hospital care for mental health.

The campaign for a new hospital started seven years ago. Windsor Regional Hospital and Hotel-dieu transferred millions of dollars, thousands of staff and several properties in an extraordinary example of collaboration to realign services so we could get this new hospital. We’re already paying a levy for the local share of the cost.

Two years ago, then health minister Eric Hoskins announced that we were moving to the second stage, planning what each program in the new hospital will need. But the money never came. Now other cities that also want new hospitals have skipped past us, like Ottawa, which got $9 million to fund Stage 2.

The tribunal’s decision on the city’s plan to open the southeast for development, including the new hospital, hinges on how much land will be needed for population and employment in the next 20 years. The tribunal calls the city’s study thorough, its peer review robust and the results conservative.

The peer review actually states that more land will be needed, the tribunal notes. The city will need both infill and new land to meet the growing demand, it concludes.

For example, of the 6,900 new dwelling units believed needed by 2036, half will be built through infill and intensification and half on the new land. Two-thirds of the land needed for employment will come from existing properties, including brownfield sites, and the rest from the new land.

Though it will take time to develop the new land, the new hospital will end up adjacent to residential and commercial areas accessible by walking, cycling and transit, the tribunal concludes.

It also notes that important health-care services will remain downtown. An urgent care clinic open 18 hours a day, staffed by emergency department doctors and nurses, with a CT scanner, lab and pharmacy, will be able to treat 40 per cent of those who go to emergency rooms. There will also be chronic pain management, dialysis and outpatient mental-health care.

Hotel-dieu Grace will provide chronic care, rehabilitation and mental-health care at its campus on the west side.

Not long ago, Windsor was losing population and desperate for jobs and investment. Developing farm land on the edge of the city seemed irresponsible. But that’s all changed. Our population has grown by 10,000 since the beginning of 2018. People who left have returned. People fed up with Toronto are coming. And so are people from around the world looking for a better life.

The prosperous economy and targeted incentives mean brownfield sites and vacant lots and buildings are being redeveloped, including hundreds of apartments and condos across the city.

We need $2 billion for this hospital. And we need it from a debt-ridden government faced with numerous similar proposals, many from ridings where it has members, unlike here.

We need to fight for it.