Two Niagara MPPs, Fort Erie Mayor blast Province over cuts to overnight services at two hospitals
Published May 31, 2023 at 3:41 pm
Word spread quickly after Niagara Health recently announced they were eliminating overnight treatment at the Port Colborne and Fort Erie urgent care centres starting July 5 and local officials are not happy about the decision.
Fort Erie Mayor Wayne Redekop said there are 8,000 residents in Fort Erie without a family doctor so their first point of contact with the health care system is an urgent care centre.
“We need the province to take action on the ‘state of our emergencies’ and avoid further consequences and failures of our provincial health care system to provide quality health care that Fort Erie and all Ontarians need and deserve,” said Redekop.
“There should be no second class citizens when it comes to health care in Ontario.”
Niagara Centre MPP Jeff Burch said the numbers were even worse in Port Colborne. “Around 10,000 people in Port Colborne are without a family physician, and folks that rely on the Port Colborne and Fort Erie Urgent Care Centres will need to travel to other facilities in Niagara which often already operate above 100 per cent capacity.”
Niagara Falls MPP Wayne Gates, who also represents Fort Erie and Niagara-on-the-Lake, said the Province is in a position to fix the health care situation but won’t.
“(Premier Doug) Ford has the means to provide immediate emergency funding for Fort Erie, an urgent care centre in my community that helps take the burden off our emergency rooms,” said Gates.
“We have a crisis in our health care system, here in Fort Erie and across the province of Ontario because this government has refused to address healthcare staffing shortages. The people of Fort Erie deserve better – it’s time for Ford to step up to the plate and show some leadership and support.”
In announcing Niagara Health’s decision, President and CEO Lynn Guerriero says it is a necessary step to maintain emergency departments in the region.
“The priority for us and the commitment we are making to the community is that we will do everything we can to keep our emergency departments open so those being Welland, Niagara Falls, and St. Catharines. In order to do that we have to have the ability to redeploys some of our physicians who would normally work overnight in the urgent care centres to work in our emergency departments.”
As it is, in July and August alone, the health unit said their emergency departments will be short 274 physician shifts and scrambling to fill the holes.
Even with the overnight closures in Fort Erie and Port Colborne, Guerriero said they are going to be short staff throughout the summer.