Dear Clients,

Today we were called to an emergency meeting at West Lincoln Memorial Hospital (WLMH) to meet with representatives of the Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) leadership & administration. We were provided with an external consultant’s report that shows that our operating room does not meet current standards for accreditation. The worry is, although patients have not been negatively affected to date, we are required to act before there is a problem. This report indicates that our operating room requires significant renovations ($8.6 million dollars) to meet standards. This renovation would impact the delivery of services. In short, during a major renovation like this would be difficult to keep an operating room running. The estimated time to complete the renovations are lengthy (27 months). The bigger issue is the aging infrastructure – similar to renovating an older home you need to stop and ask yourself: does it make sense to renovate or is it just better to rebuild?

In order to run an obstetrical department, we need to have a functioning operating room that can perform surgeries, like emergency c-sections. As medical and hospital staff, we were told that if the government does not provide funding to address the infrastructure issues immediately, the operating room and obstetrical department could be closed as early as January 2019.

We, like you, have more questions than answers at this point. It is imperative that we let our MPP, Sam Oosterhoff know of our concerns. We also need to contact our Health Minister and Premier. Please see contact information for each of these representatives below.

The Leadership at HHS is proposing (strongly suggesting) to “temporarily” close the OR until the renovations can be accomplished, provided that the provincial funding IS approved. Closing the OR and OBS departments as “temporary” actions can have long term effects and we predict could be disastrous for the entire hospital and our community as a whole. The operating room and our obstetrical department are the heart of our hospital. Losing these services will likely negatively impact other services and units offered within the hospital; like being able to staff an ER department consistently and competently.

We remain hopeful, that through intense public pressure, the province will commit with immediate solutions that allows obstetrics to stay at WLMH.

We understand this email could cause anxiety as many of you are planning to birth your babies in this community. It is hard to be faced with such uncertainty. We keep reminding ourselves that at this very moment the only thing we can do is to TAKE ACTION. Let your voices be heard. Call your MPP.Email the Minister of Health and our Premier. Take action this week.

WLMH’s future depends on it.

 

Thanks in advance for your support.

Sincerely,

Lincoln Community Midwives