|
Sikhs fund
Canada hospital, now pushed to fight it
 Peel
Region's Sikh community played a key role in establishing Brampton's
gleaming new hospital. It has played an equally major role in the
troubled institution's first major crisis.
BRAMPTON:
The opening of Brampton Civic Hospital was supposed to be an
occasion for celebration, especially among the city's burgeoning
Sikh community.
They had been
actively courted by the hospital foundation, and responded with
tremendous enthusiasm, raising $2.8-million with a Punjabi radiothon
and an incredible $200,000 during a 48-hour Sikh prayer ceremony in
July.
The new
$790-million facility, built in a field in northeast Brampton, was
meant to take pressure off the aging
Peel
Memorial
Hospital
downtown, with its water leaks and occasional blackouts, and offer
the community an improved level of health care.
Instead, the new
hospital, which opened two months ago, has become a public relations
nightmare for staff and administrators, with unproven allegations of
mismanagement and substandard health care sparking street protests
among the very community that worked to help raise funds for the
project.
The deaths of
two hospital patients, both Sikhs – one of them a man whose family
donated $25,000 to the foundation – have been held up as examples of
how the hospital is failing the community. Hamstrung by privacy
legislation that prevents them from talking about individual cases,
hospital administrators have been forced to limit their response to
press releases outlining hospital procedures.
Responding to
community pressure, the province appointed a supervisor to oversee
the hospital in a bid to restore public confidence in the new
facility. How it went wrong is a puzzle. In five pieces.
| |
Sikhs in
Brampton
 According
to 2001 Statistics Canada information, the Sikh religion is the
third largest in Brampton behind Catholic and Protestant. Under
the public private partnership (P3) funding formula being used
to build the new hospital, the community had to raise 30 per
cent of the building's total cost of $536 million.
William
Osler Health Centre (WOHC) paid a tribute to the Canadian Sikh
community by naming the new hospital's emergency department as
Guru Nanak Emergency Services Department.
|
|
The press
Rajinder Saini
was listening to a local Punjabi radio program about Brampton Civic
Hospital when local MPP Vic Dhillon called into the show to say one
of his close family friends had recently died there.
As the publisher
of the Parvasi Weekly newspaper, Saini had been receiving complaints
for years from readers about the quality of health care in Brampton.
Things were supposed to be different at the new
Brampton
Civic Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility that had opened on Oct.
28.
Dhillon, Saini
remembers, described how his friend had waited eight or 10 hours in
the emergency room at the new hospital, and that during the man's
subsequent 10-day stay at the hospital for pancreatitis, his family
complained that he was not properly cared for.
Saini called
Dhillon, who put him in touch with the family. The next day, Nov.
20, the family's story was front-page news in Parvasi Weekly, which
has a circulation of 20,000 in the GTA, Vancouver and India.
Local Punjabi
radio shows picked it up, and Saini talked about it on his own radio
show, which runs on CJMR 1320 AM. The Times of India picked up the
story, says Saini. He was invited to talk about it on television.
"It was big
news," says Saini. "Everybody talked about this story. There was big
outrage in our community."
"It's a very
small kind of community newspaper, but still I am trying to run it
very professionally," says Saini, who operates out of a small office
opposite a strip mall in
Mississauga.
"We have nothing
against the hospital staff or management. We are trying to raise the
voice. The voice of the people."
The doctor
By the time
stories of what was happening in the emergency department of
Brampton Civic Hospital reached the ears of the man who runs the
place, the facts had been distorted beyond recognition.
"`I know
somebody delivered a baby on the sidewalk outside the emergency
department...while this man was dying on the floor of your waiting
room,'" Dr. Naveed Mohammad was told at a dinner party.
"There was a lot
of misinformation out there," says Mohammad. "That was one of the
most painful parts for me. It really painted our hospital and the
emergency department in a negative manner and that wasn't the
truth."
Neither of the
two cases that became lightning rods for controversy involved
medical error in the emergency room, says Mohammad.
"Nobody waits 10
hours in emergency to see a doctor. Everyone is assessed in a timely
fashion"
 The problem was
one of expectations, says Mohammad. The community was expecting that
the hospital would open at full capacity, with 608 beds. It has 479.
The remainder will open over the next four years. Physicians, nurses
and staff didn't anticipate the challenges that would come with
moving to a spanking new hospital, from mastering the computer
system to finding the stairs.
They didn't
anticipate that demand would soar as it did – the new facility drew
20 per cent more emergency-room traffic than predicted, and the
number of very sick patients to emergency doubled. Mohammad is
Punjabi. He says he understands the culture. He understands why
members of the community are upset. He even understands why the same
people who told him they understand his position took to the streets
in protest.
"A lot of
community leaders had to decide whether to support the hospital or
the community," says Mohammad. "The community is large, it's what's
around you all the time. If you're someone who has to depend on the
community for business...it's difficult."
The patients
The first
patient death to draw media attention was Harnek Sidhu, 52. His
family told Parvasi Weekly that he was not properly attended to in
the emergency department at
Brampton
Civic
Hospital,
despite the fact that Sidhu was vomiting and in acute pain.
His son Sandeep
later told the Star that it took 12 hours for his father to be
assigned a bed. His father died 10 days later of pancreatitis.
Sandeep blamed
it on the fact that the hospital was built and is operated as a
public-private partnership, with the private sector operating
non-clinical services, such as housekeeping.
He said the
hospital is understaffed and the focus is not health care, but on
moving patients through the system as quickly as possible.
The family had
donated $25,000 to the hospital.
Amarjit Narwal
was home when he suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right arm and
leg. He was treated at Trillium Health Centre in Mississauga, the
regional centre for acute stroke care.
Early Saturday
morning, Narwal was transferred to Brampton Civic Hospital. Friends
and family visited with him all day and were reassured by the fact
that he was talking and asking for juice. Sunday morning, his
cousin, Inderjit Nijjar, returned to find him in a coma.
"I started
acting up. I started calling the nurse, asking her to call the
doctor and look at him," says Nijjar.
The nurse paged
a doctor at home. The doctor called back, but did not come to the
hospital, not even after Narwal began having seizures, according to
Nijjar. Finally the nurses brought a doctor down from the intensive
care unit. He read the file and told the family that nothing could
be done.
Narwal, 42, with
a 2-year-old son in India, died that night.
Nijjar said he
tried to get help for his cousin – he called someone he knew on the
hospital board, he called someone he knew involved in fundraising
for the hospital committee.
"`Do me a favour,
there's no point in screaming. Write up a written complaint, give it
to me Monday. I will follow up,'" Nijjar was told.
The opposition
Some of the
groundwork for community discontent was laid down by the Ontario
Health Coalition, which began calling members of the Punjabi press
in September to organize a series of town hall meetings on the topic
of health care in Brampton.
The Ontario
Health Coalition is opposed to hospitals built on the Brampton Civic
Hospital model – so-called P3s – which involve partnerships between
the private and public sectors.
The coalition
represents, among other community groups, the Council of Canadians
and several powerful unions, including health-care unions. Executive
director Natalie Mehra says that under P3 models, hospital profits
are siphoned off to the private sector, at the expense of health
care.
The town-hall
meetings, which took place a month before the hospital opened, were
designed to bring attention to the issue in time for the provincial
election in October, Mehra said.
"We wanted to
push the province to make some promises leading into the election
and coming out of the election," she said.
It was through
the Ontario Health Coalition that journalists like Parvasi Weekly
publisher Rajinder Saini learned that the newly opened hospital
would have fewer beds than originally thought and that the old Peel
Memorial Hospital would be closed once the new hospital opened.
"Until then, I
don't believe that anybody in the community knew that if we are
getting this new hospital, they are snatching away Peel Memorial
hospital, too," says Saini. "That's how it started simmering around,
you know. People started complaining that, `Why are they closing
down Peel Memorial?'"
The community
Brampton
is home to a large and politically important South Asian
population.
South Asians
make up 83,245 of the 206,185 immigrants in the city, which now has
a total population of 400,000.
 The overall
population of the suburb northwest of Toronto has grown by 60 per
cent in 10 years, to 400,000, resulting in gridlock, crowded schools
and, critics say, social and community services that have failed to
keep up. The accusation that there aren't enough services, including
libraries and community centres, to serve the growing population is
a frequent topic of heated debate on local Punjabi radio.
Health care has
long been an issue in the city – until the new hospital was built,
one-third of patients seeking emergency care travelled outside of
Brampton to get it – to hospitals in Etobicoke and Mississauga.
The hospital
foundation has actively sought the support of the Sikh community,
says Anne Randell, president and CEO of the William Osler Health
Centre Foundation, which includes
Brampton
Civic
Hospital,
Etobicoke General Hospital and Peel Memorial Hospital. A radiothon
in the community two years ago raised $2.8-million.
This summer,
15,000 people attended a weekend Akhand Paath ceremony at the
hospital – a continuous reading of the Sikh scripture from beginning
to end. In all, $200,000 was raised.
The new
emergency department was named for Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism.
Two Sikhs sit on the foundation board and three on the hospital
board.
"This was a
collective effort by a portion of our community to do a lot for the
hospital, so it's not that person who donated $10-million that
expects you do to something for them, it's the whole community,"
says Dr. Naveed Mohammad, corporate chief of emergency services.
(Courtesy thestar.com)
26
December 2007
|
Read Also