Despite new name, hospital at crossroads

Scarborough’s only acute-care hospital adopts a new name on Thursday, the Scarborough Health Network (SHN), and looks forward to a year either of great progress or great disappointment.

Its General campus, where SHN and its navy-and-teal logo will be celebrated, is one of three the province ordered into a merger two years ago.

The General’s operating rooms, first used in 1957, are so inadequate now they’ve become a touchstone politicians, such as Toronto Mayor John Tory, use to point out lack of investment in Scarborough.

In the basement, signs hang from the ceiling where the Diagnostic Imaging Concourse, promised by Ontario’s former Liberal government, is to be built.

Like the rest of Scarborough, people at the Scarborough Hospital (TSH) and the Rouge Valley Health System’s (RVHS) Centenary site waited patiently for the Liberals to approve and start capital projects at these aging buildings.

An expert panel in 2015 told the province to build them all: new operating rooms at the General, new emergency departments at Centenary and at Birchmount, the third campus, plus the DI Concourse.

Panel members went further, saying a master plan for Scarborough should include a new “comprehensive” hospital campus that could open by 2030.

The Liberals started committing only as an election loomed this year.

In February, then-premier Kathleen Wynne stood at Centenary, pledging its emergency wing would be “three times as big as it is now,” but not saying when construction would start.

In March, local Liberal MPPs said the government would spend more than $1.1 billion at the hospital over 10 years, and money for the projects at Centenary and General was budgeted already.

They also announced funding for Bridletowne Community Hub, a new Agincourt satellite, stalled for years, to house

the hospital’s entire dialysis program as well as a YMCA.

Then Progressive Conservatives won Ontario, and started a line-by-line review of what Liberals promised.

So, as each hospital project moves through planning stages toward construction, the coming year should prove decisive. Will the PCs move quickly on the improvements, or drag their heels?

Hospital CEO Elizabeth Buller said she expects more approvals within a year or so, probably around the same time.

For under $200 million, she said, the new government can have several projects in Scarborough to finish in the “medium term,” five to 10 years.

These projects, she said, employing a phrase from the PC campaign, will “contribute to ending ‘hallway medicine.’ These contribute to greater efficiencies.”

“All indications,” Buller said, point to each project moving ahead, even the Birchmount emergency department, still in the earliest, pre-capital, phase.

Significantly, a single operating room has been added to the proposed DI Concourse, a sign another 20 new operating rooms SRH proposed at General — priced in 2009 at $250 million — are much further away.

In January, after letting architects examine its buildings, the hospital will show Scarborough residents at town halls three options for the future, and the option it prefers, Buller said.

That will be either one “megahospital site,” or two or three separate ones.