To the Editor: Recently there has been some questions about Weyburn's aging hospital and the seemingly endless delay in replacing that facility.
To the Editor:
Recently there has been some questions about Weyburn's aging hospital and the seemingly endless delay in replacing that facility.
First: We should be clear that while this hospital may be located in Weyburn, it serves a greater need and a greater geographic area full of activity and people.
Second: This community and this area have been very agreeable in waiting for many years as different governing parties have come and gone promising a new hospital.
So why is it that the governing party of the day, whichever it is, feels that it is acceptable to keep on promising and promising. By way of explanation the community gets a series of non-answers from the decision makers and representatives of the decision makers explaining why it can't happen now, or telling us what they have done elsewhere.
Isn't now the time?
It is a time of growth in population, growth in the economy, growth in prosperity, growth in contribution by this area to the provincial health. We are told that there are other needs. We know that.
Everyone is well aware that there are and will always be other needs. But this is not a reason why this community's need is subject to the other needs being met first year after year and now likely decade after decade.
We are at least partially responsible for our fate. We hate to complain. In fact we appear to take it to the extreme. While other communities hustle, push and pressure we apparently will agree to, and say thank you when our community is going without what the community needs, and should have.
We almost take pride in our willingness for this community to not have. Why? That may be unhealthy. After all it is not like we have a new, or even almost new, hospital and want another one built before the one we have is sufficiently aged.
Much has been made of the decreasing number of physicians located or locating here. Medicine is about technology. When our health, or our spouse's health or our children's health or our parent's health is on the line then we want the technology and we want the doctor.
Yet we are being told and we are to believe that the quality of the local hospital is not a primary consideration in the decision process of a health professional as to where they will practice and live. Seriously, we are asked to believe this. I am not convinced. I do not believe.
On the contrary the longer the old hospital remains, the longer there is no new hospital, the harder it will be to attract the people we need and to keep the people we have.
Next year or the year after will they tell us that since there are so few doctors here, so few babies delivered here, we don't warrant a new hospital, maybe not even an old hospital. It will be a self fulfilling strategy. The statistics will say that this community does not use its hospital enough.
Our leaders take great pride in the proclamation that Saskatchewan is now a have province. That message is being taken out of the province and out of the country. But you could not tell it from looking at the Weyburn hospital.
If we are serious about health care in this community then we should begin to demonstrate that seriousness where it counts, with the people who make the decision to continue denying this community a new hospital .
Join the Facebook page "New Weyburn Hospital Now"
George Siourounis
Weyburn
