REGINA – The controversy surrounding the closure of the Plains Health Centre in Regina is beginning to heat up.
Health care across southern Saskatchewan will suffer if the Plains hospital in Regina is closed, said a number of critics of the plan to close the hospital.
“If you allow the Plains Health Centre to close, you have just delivered a serious blow to health care in rural Saskatchewan,” Brownlee farmer Ken Pottruff told a crowd of about 800 people at a rally in front of the legislature recently.
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The Regina District Health Board denies health services will be lost. The board decided in 1993 to close the hospital and concentrate the city’s health care in two other hospitals.
It said the cost of upgrading the Plains to meet safety standards is too high and three hospitals in the city is too many. Instead, the two other hospitals will be expanded and the Plains closed.
Board chair Dan de Vlieger said no health services will be lost in the consolidation. “The same services, the same programs will still be there,” he said after the rally.
Many staff, former patients and people in rural Saskatchewan have campaigned against the closure. Petitions have been circulated around Regina and through rural communities that use the Plains. They have so far collected about 26,000 names and petition organizers hope to have 100,000 names by fall so the provincial government will call a plebiscite.
Rural hospital
Hospital staff and patients addressed the rally. Robert Kosolofski spoke of his four-year-old daughter Karlee, who was revived after spending six hours outside her house in -22 C conditions. She was taken to the Plains where her blood was warmed and she was brought out of a near-freezing state.
Rally organizer and Plains nurse Darlene Sterling said about 70 percent of the patients in the hospital are from rural Saskatchewan.
“Why is the South Saskatchewan Plains Hospital even involved in the Regina Health District,” she asked rhetorically. “It’s not a Regina hospital. They really don’t have the right to shut it down.”
But de Vlieger said all three Regina hospitals serve rural Saskatchewan, so characterizing the Plains as a rural hospital and the other two as city hospitals “is a complete misperception.”
If the board’s plans are followed, the Plains will close by 1998. But the board, which was provincially appointed, faces an election before then. New Democratic Party MLA Andrew Thomson said “our chance to change the health board is
coming this fall.”
He said the government, which gave decision-making power to health boards as part of its “wellness” approach, thinks the board needs to answer many questions about hospital closure plans.
The Progressive Conservative and Liberal health critics said the NDP health care policy is a shambles and the closure of the Plains is typical of government damage to rural health care.
