A thousand cuts

It’s happening again.

Belleville General Hospital (BGH) is being squeezed. Too many patients, too few beds and no money to add more. So, just like every other time that BGH has run into trouble, it is the Picton hospital that has to pay. Resources are being taken away from Prince Edward County Memorial to shore up the Belleville hospital—and our beloved community hospital takes one more step toward oblivion.

It is a pattern that has become all too familiar to residents of Prince Edward County.

Cast your memory back a couple of winters to a crowded cafeteria at the high school in Picton. Police were stationed at the doorway and hundreds turned away back into the cold night.

It was here that former Quinte Health Care Chief Executive Officer Bruce Laughton explained that his latest recovery plan for the corporation required eight beds to be moved from Picton to Belleville. He acknowledged, too, that in an earlier draft of the recovery plan, Prince Edward County Memorial hospital was to be closed as a cost savings measure—but that he had personally rejected this option.

The message was clear. Give up the eight beds or we will kill your hospital. Negotiation was always of the bare knuckle variety with Bruce Laughton. Shortly before this raucous meeting, County physicians and the Family Health Team had proposed an alternative. Much of the pressure on Belleville, and to some extent Trenton Memorial, they explained, was due to the short supply of family doctors and general practitioners in those communities. This meant that many who landed in these urban hospitals had no family doctor overseeing their care. The hospital had to hire doctors to look after these unattached or “orphan” patients. In some years, we were told, this added expense would cost the hospital more than $2 million.

The County docs proposed that they could take many of these unattached patients at Prince Edward County Memorial. This would, according to the plan, ease the funding and capacity pressure at BGH and in Trenton.

QHC agreed. It would leave the eight beds in Picton and refer these unattached patients to this hospital.

The plan worked for a while—though not very well. Understandably, many Trenton and Belleville residents and their families wanted to be treated at their hospital, in their own community. Over time both these communities welcomed new family doctors. So now QHC isn’t spending nearly as much on top-up fees to doctors to manage unattached patients; but the demand on beds and nursing resources is growing.

So here we are again. BGH wants these eight beds. But this means Picton must give up a third of its beds. Adding eight beds to a 200-bed facility is likely just a stop-gap measure— but cutting eight beds from a 24-bed hospital is like losing a limb.

Worse still is that it solves nothing. Once moved, these beds will be filled up quickly—and the pressure for more beds will grow all over again. The province has made it clear it will provide no more money to this hospital corporation. So inevitably some hospital administrators will once again gaze across the Bay of Quinte pining for more beds from Prince Edward County Memorial.

There is, perhaps, a difference this time. Bruce Laughton is gone. Mary Clare Egberts is running QHC now. She has said many times and quite persuasively that she believes Prince Edward County Memorial can and will be a revitalized rural community hospital. She has reviewed the work done by the local doctors and Family Health Team to develop a more fully integrated primary care facility with the Picton hospital as its hub. It is a model that realizes the potential of technology including electronic medical records and video conferencing to transform the way we access health care in a smaller community.

We can’t have the best heart surgeon in Picton—but perhaps we could have her on the screen from wherever she is in the province, walking us through the procedure using the same images and data gathered in Picton.

Mary Clare Egberts says she continues to believe in this vision—that she will work passionately to fight for this vision.

But can she withstand the forces that are allowing BGH to grow at Picton’s expense? And if BGH is successful in pulling eight more beds out of Prince Edward County Memorial—how long will it be before they are back looking for the remaining 16? If the logic is sound now—how will Egberts or anyone else resist the call the next time?

Ready yourself, it is time to fight for your hospital again.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca