Local hospitals well past their best-before date
Fed up with their inability to get answers from the overwhelmed Windsor health system about the excruciating shoulder pain that was keeping her awake night after night, Hilary and Gloria Payne decided, out of desperation, to seek help in Michigan.
The Paynes’ first clue, back in 2017, that this would be a different experience came at the entrance to the Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital where a polite, clean-cut young man asked if they would like their car parked.
The free valet service would bring a smile to anyone accustomed to feeding rapacious meters at Windsor hospitals. The smiles turned to grins as they entered the building. “It was like walking into a five-star hotel. The lounge was huge and there was a great feeling of spaciousness,” said the former Windsor councillor. “There was a friendly, efficient atmosphere and excellent surroundings. It was just so different from here.”
Within 20 minutes, they were seen by a Russian-born specialist who spent a full hour examining Gloria, explaining her problem and offering solutions that included medication and an exercise program. “She got answers there. She found out what she was dealing with, and the pain gradually went away,” said Payne. They had been warned when they made the appointment (which included a followup visit) that it would cost US$250. The bill that came in the mail was for US$125, and worth every penny. (Full disclosure: I have relatives who work at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit)
Payne is under no illusions that everything is fine with American health care. He shudders to think how fast hospital bills could mount for someone without good medical coverage.
But the cross-border experience underlined, for him, just how sadly outdated, depressing and inefficient our Windsor hospitals are.
“I’m not criticizing the medical staff in Windsor. There are competent doctors and nurses and staff on both sides of the border. But they are overwhelmed in Windsor working with these horrible, ancient facilities (at the Met and Ouellette campuses) and our poor doctors are just swamped.
“Medical technology has advanced so much but the bricks and mortar here in Windsor have not kept up. Those buildings have outlived their best-before date by at least 50 years and they’re still just reworked and rehashed old buildings.” He’s convinced that working in such old and inefficient buildings must have a negative impact on staff morale.
The hospital in the high-income Bloomfield area might be the polar opposite of Windsor’s acute-care facilities, but you don’t have to leave Canada to realize how desperately overdue that $2 billion mega-hospital for Windsor is.
Two of my grandkids were born in London’s Victoria Hospital. What a stark contrast between that modern campus and Windsor’s decrepit facilities. No wonder so many area patients beg their doctors to please, please send them up to London. The further up the 401 you go, and please check out wealthy Oakville’s glittering new hospital, the more you are reminded that we are an easily overlooked hospital backwater.
The Windsor-centric side of me admires the slick, sophisticated battle CAMPP (Citizens for an Accountable Megahospital Planning Process) has waged against the approved hospital site at County Road 42 and Concession 9 near Windsor airport. I initially thought a site overlooking the Detroit River east of the casino could anchor a redevelopment of the Glengarry neighbourhood. I even suggested a brownfield site, the contaminated Zalev property, to kill two birds with one stone.
But any central location would have been a kick in the teeth to the fast-growing county population that is paying its fair share for the new hospital and will, if demographic patterns hold, in the near future, outnumber Windsor.
I respect folks who place a high value on urban intensification and resisting suburban sprawl. In a perfect world, I suppose, we would all be packed into massive high-rises north of Tecumseh Road. But meanwhile, back in the real world, patients are dying because of the glaring deficiencies of our two time-warp hospital campuses.
At some point, if CAMPP drags this out to the bitter end, it will be widely viewed as dog-inmanger obstructionism aimed at ensuring a new hospital — already an uphill fight for a region with zero provincial influence — is never built.
That would be a $2-billion tragedy for our entire region.