Drifting

Transfer site? What will be left of Prince Edward County Memorial Hospital when, or if, the province considers a proposal to build a new hospital in Picton? As QHC struggles to balance its budget each year, PECMH gets a bit smaller.

Prospects for new hospital remain in limbo

The dream of a new hospital in Picton remains a faint, flickering and distant idea. Yet rather than moving nearer, the prospect of a new Prince Edward County Memorial Hospital seems no brighter at the beginning of 2016 than it did five years ago.

It was in March of 2011 that, Katherine Stansfield, then director of patient services at Quinte Health Care, stood with Barb Proctor, chair of the County healthcare advisory committee, before a gathering in Picton to unveil Quinte Health Care’s vision for a new hospital in Picton.

They rightfully cautioned that planning and approvals for a new hospital might take as much as eight to 10 years. Five years later however, the bid isn’t yet in the starting blocks.

In a New Year’s update, QHC reported that while it had recently submitted a revised “pre-capital submission” to the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (MOHLTC), officials at the ministry now want to see how a new hospital would fit in with a new master plan describing services at all four sites. That will take at least a year to do. Only then will QHC be permitted to prepare a Stage 1 business plan.

This means the earliest the PECMH proposal could go into the ministry’s review process is 2017. It will then take seven to 10 years to complete that review. It may be near the end of the next decade before a shovel, laser beam or smartphone app, begins digging for a new Picton hospital.

It is likely why the PECMH Redevelopment Committee has decided to suspend updates every two months—replacing it with quarterly updates.

When Stansfield and Proctor first announced their vision for a new Picton Hospital, the existing hospital had 24 in-patient beds—it now has 12. In these intervening five years, maternity services have been eliminated, staff have been cut and young doctors have packed it in and moved on. More staff will be cut this spring and the cafeteria closed.

Against this backdrop, Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) chief Paul Huras felt it necessary to assure County residents of his commitment to a new hospital in Picton. In the same update, Huras notes that, “capital planning is a long process…this timeline is not unusual with a project of this nature. I have committed to ensuring this hospital gets built.”

Despite Huras’s assurances some County residents are skeptical the ministry will be able overlook QHC’s perennially troubled financial performance, or that by the time they get around to looking at the PECMH redevelopment proposals there will scarcely any services left in Picton to put there.

END OF A NEW YEAR TRADITION
For years, the Prince Edward County Hospital Auxilliary presented a silver cup to the family of the first baby born at PECMH each year. Through history, the silver cup has long symbolized salvation— but in this context it was used to acknowledge new life, growth and hope. But no more.

Maternity care PECMH is among the services that has fallen under QHC’s budget cutting knife in recent years. Unless it is an emergency, babies are delivered at Belleville General Hospital.

The presentation of the silver cup, like many things at PECMH, is now just something we used to do.