GuelphToday recevied the following letter from Judy Brisson regarding the ongoing discussion about Guelph needing a second hospital.
Dear editor
Although I agree that wait time to be admitted to a bed at GGH should be shorter, is the answer really a second hospital?
I note that Kitchener/Waterloo, with a population about double that of Guelph’s, has two hospitals, Cambridge with a population similar to Guelph has one hospital. Here are some other considerations. In 1980, the average number of hospital beds in Canada stood at 6.75 per one thousand inhabitants. By 2020, this rate had decreased to 2.5, a rate lower than almost all other developed countries.
Has the provincial government failed to maintain hospital bed numbers as the population increased? We have a doctor and nurse shortage in Ontario, made worse by a failure to increase medical school enrolment and recent unconstitutional limitations on health-care workers' wages.
Have provincial government policies failed to maintain enough health care workers to staff our current beds and staff new ones? Currently about 15 per cent of acute care beds are occupied by long term care patients waiting for placement.
Has our provincial government failed to fund LTC expansion despite projections for decades showing the need? Would it make more sense to expand St Joseph’s LTC beds and expand GGH’s acute care beds instead of building a second hospital?
Finally, hospital expansion is a provincial responsibility, not a local responsibility. To call on local council to build a new hospital instead of libraries and recreational centres shows a profound misunderstanding of local and provincial powers.
Judy Brisson
Guelph
