We All Need Hotel Dieu
This turn of the screw could be seen coming down pike at us, but one can always hope.
The Hospital Foundation and local citizens are fighting this blow to our community. I don’t know anything about the numbers of running our health care system. But what I do know is how what is going on is affecting the morale and health of the people in our region.
Many people, judging by their letters and online comments, seem to feel that Perth-Andover should just suck it up and get on with life without the hospital.
Why do we need our own hospital when Plaster Rock and Bath already lost theirs, and we have this great big shiny regional hospital in Hartland?
Valid point, maybe, looking at the issue through the lens of the corporate mindset.
But if you look at our health care issue through the lens of Continued from page one…
compassion, humanity and true community health a different picture emerges.
New Brunswick likes to promote an image of wonderful quality of life and family values. But ripping out small health centres and hospitals has done nothing but destroy communities.
It’s been like watching a slow motion train wreck for the past few years.
People need to feel valued and secure in order to create healthy, viable communities.
It seems to me that this current lust to consolidate rural health care services into one giant regional centre is spawned by the same mindset that has gutted economies all over the world. It is especially obvious in the USA where corporations have destroyed lives, jobs and communities all in the name of “the bottom line” (and fat bonuses for executives….) as they move operations to giant factories someplace else.
Granted, the regional health centre isn’t in China, but it might as well be for the total effect it’s had on our communities!
The interesting thing about this Upper River Valley Health Centre is that it’s been an unhappy institution from the get-go.
It’s pretty and shiny, but it has been running at about a third of its capacity ever since it opened.
To this day if something serious is wrong with you, you’re still going to get shipped off to Saint John or Fredericton.
It has had difficulty attracting doctors and surgeons because, hey, it’s located in the middle of a field! You’ve got to keep an eye peeled lest you hit a deer in the driveway!
Building it in Hartland hasn’t made the village any kind of mecca for new housing and businesses, either.
It’s got a negative feel going on because of all the resentment it has aroused.
From an energetic viewpoint, pretty much everyone in the region loathes the damn hospital. How can you have a truly healing environment when everyone is pissed off about it?
Nearly every employee or member of the medical staff have to commute to get to their jobs.
Staff who live in Woodstock used to leave the hospital to run errands or eat out on their meal breaks. Now they can’t. This has hurt small businesses in Woodstock. And it keeps the staff trapped all day which leads to yet more simmering resentment.
Since the place doesn’t really belong to any one community, it does not inspire loyalty. All hospitals need crews of dedicated volunteers. Hartland is distinctly lacking in volunteers.
This pervasive feeling of anger and resentment does not make for a healing environment.
True healing takes place when people feel secure and cared for. True healing takes place when people are close to their families.
Go ahead and laugh if you want, or damn me for a muffin head, but even the Society of Rural Canadian Physicians has discovered, in study after study, that people heal faster and better in their own communities.
In obstetrics this is particularly obvious. When women must leave their communities to have their babies they become much more stressed.
This results in more complications, birth difficulties and babies born with lower birth weights. Which of course also leads to much higher costs to the system.
The mothers are now too far away for friends and family to easily visit, adding to their distress.
Many of the fathers must stay home to care for the older children and cannot be there for the new baby and mom.
It harms the elderly. When an older person must spend time in hospital and it’s difficult for family to visit, they spend lonely days and nights which further harms their health.
The Hartland facility boasts on their website that they have “45 in-patient beds.”
Hotel Dieu used to have 65 beds!
And here’s another interesting fact to consider: When the Hotel Dieu was a private business operated by the Sisters it consistently RAN IN THE BLACK.
Then it was regionalized and all the extra money was promptly siphoned off to Fredericton.
Regionalizing services, any services, whether it’s health, education or manufacturing always ultimately results in higher overall operating costs along with reduced overall quality and services.
Smaller health centres that are central to their communities can and do run efficiently and profitably.
When will people wake up and grasp this fact?
Here’s a tasty tidbit of irony I heard in Plaster Rock: Back when Horizon High Command came to the village to announce the loss of their health services, one of the officials present anxiously announced that he wanted to finish killing Plaster Rock and get back home to Fredericton.
He didn’t want to have to “drive the gulch in the dark”
But he was willing to condemn an entire village to that future.
Stephanie Kelley
