The Ontario Health Coalition has raised concerns about a Niagara Health System plan to close beds at the Welland Hospital. The beds are housed in a wing of the Welland hospital that includes an “extended care unit” and a “long-term care unit”. The hospital plans to sell off the license to operate these beds, possibly to a for-profit company. Niagara health care activist Sue Salzer calls this a surprise move. “It even goes beyond the devastating cuts in the NHS ‘Hospital Improvement Plan’.” The NHS suggests that it is one of the few acute-care hospitals that still operate long-term-care beds. For the record, most hospitals provide both acute and non-acute services, and some provide long term care services. NHS provides a whole range of health care services to the community far beyond acute care. Only half of its in-patients fall into the ‘acute’ care category. And many more patients never even see a hospital bed, much less an acute care bed. Here is NHS
Notes from Leftwords -- Doug Allan