The fate of Grimsby’s hospital is once again in the hands of the provincial government.
Dr. Matthew Noble Wohlgemut, the interim site lead at West Lincoln Memorial, says that unless they receive confirmation of funding to rebuild the hospital “none of the rest of the pieces make sense.”
Grimsby’s hospital was amalgamated under the umbrella of Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) in 2013, and a plan is currently before the Ministry of Health asking for funding of $8.6 million in upgrades.
HHS recently sent shockwaves through the West Niagara community when it proposed to relocate the surgical and obstetrics programs to its other sites for 27 months while the upgrades are completed.
Noble Wohlgemut says the implications would carry over into other departments and could be “catastrophic” to the life of the hospital, since “these things all run downhill like a stack of dominoes.”
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He notes, for example, that “if the OR (operating room) closes and the obstetrics unit closes, we can no longer support a team of anesthetists. If we no longer have a team of anethetists, we can’t run an emergency room or an ICU.”
Noble Wohlgemut adds that the other concern is that once services are put on pause, it’s a big step to just assume that they will reappear.
That concern has been echoed within the West Niagara community, and it has prompted thousands of residents to sign petitions calling on the provincial government to commit to reconstruction and to ensuring that services are maintained at West Lincoln Memorial Hospital.
Niagara West Conservative MPP Sam Oosterhoff is vowing to do everything within his power to secure the $8.6 million in funding, describing it as his “number one priority.”
Oosterhoff says he “won’t stop fighting until we have the doors open on the new build.”
He expects to present the community’s petitions as soon as next week at Queen’s Park.
Noble Wohlgemut says he is confident that if the province commits to the rebuild, they can work with Hamilton Health Sciences to keep the Grimsby hospital’s “full set of services intact” during reconstruction.
He stresses that there are alternatives and solutions that we can still bring to bear and “different ways of approaching the infrastructure challenges.”
West Lincoln Memorial was built in 1946, and this is not the first time that its future has been in doubt.
In the 1990s, Mike Harris’ Conservative government proposed closing the hospital, but eventually backed down after an outpouring of community outrage.
The Liberals committed to the $136.8-million rebuild in 2005, but scrapped the project during their spring budget in 2012.
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