On Monday night at our Halton Hills Town Council Meeting a delegation from Halton Health Care made a presentation asking us to consider making a contribution of $4.546million towards an addition to the Georgetown Hospital.
Pictured here are the front entrance and the ambulance entrance to the Georgetown Hospital. The hospital dates back to 1961 and the Bennett wing was added in 1985.
The expansion that is proposed is to create space for the CT Scanner and expand the emergency and imaging departments.
This request raises many questions, some of which can be answered here and others that are more complex but should be considered.
The first question is why would a municipal government be asked to finance a medical facility when it is clearly not part of the municipal mandate? The answer is that this has become part of the new landscape in Ontario where growth is rampant and the province simply does not have a business plan that deals witht his issue. I participated in a forum hosted by Halton Region 3 years ago where municipal and provincial political leaders tried to figure out some of the financial issues that were causing us so many headaches. It was clearly pointed out by Mayor Hazel McCallion that the province needs a business plan. Unfortunately the provincial government continues to work in silos called ministries and they do not have a consolidated plan. Health care costs are out of control but we are continuing doing the same thing expecting a different result.
Unfortunately a place like Milton that is the fastest growing municipality in Canada can't get their hospital expansion. Therefore the chances of Georgetown getting anyone's attention is pretty slim. In other words, we can wait it out or we can pay for it ourselves. The choice is ours. It was estimated that we might wait 8 to 10 years.
The next question is, do we really need it? The CT Scanner is considered today to be an essential tool in diagnosis. In the past year 1500 patients were transferred from Georgetown Hospital to other hospitals to get CT Scans. Over 500 of those were emergency patients. There would of course be a large number of other scans done for patients who were referred by their family doctors or specialists. Undoubtedly we could use the scanner but on the other hand, people are accessing scans by travelling to other hospitals.
It is interesting to note however that most of the other hospitals that we Georgetowners use have capital campaigns and have secured funding from their home municipalities. So their residents are paying for something that we are using. That is an important consideration when we gripe that out of towners are using our ER. Our hospital is not a full service hospital so we are quite dependent on the other hospitals in the system. The City of Burlington has committed $60 million to their hospital and the Town of Oakville has committed $170 million to the new Oakville hospital. Milton will commit funds but we don't know how much yet. In that context you can see that $4.5 is not an outrageous amount in order to get ready access to a CT Scanner and a much improved ER. But it is a lot to us since we are small and not growing much at this time.
I would be interested in your opinion on this matter. It will be debated by council at our meeting on Monday January 24th at 6:30pm. I have also asked that information be posted on the town's website and hopefully there will also be a place on the website where you can leave your comments.
