Blood-stained hospital curtains can't hide Liberal health-care neglect

K. Martin wrote in “It’s pretty bad when hospital isn’t sterile”, (St. Catharines Standard, Nov.1, 2008):

“Re:Germs found on hospital curtains, The Standard, Oct. 29.

I wanted to make the public aware that we have contaminated curtains right here in our own hospitals.

My daughter was admitted to St. Catharines General Hospital in June, and they put her in a room at the back of the emergency department.

About a dozen other people were waiting there for proper rooms, none of which were available.

As my husband and I were sitting with our daughter, I noticed the curtains that hung between the patients had blood stains on them. I brought it to the attention of the nurse who was on duty and he told another nurse, but it didn't seem to bother either one of them as they with what they were doing.

The next day I went to pick up my daughter and the same blood-stained curtain was still hanging there.

It's pretty bad when a place that is supposed to be clean and sterile isn't. Now I know why so many people say if you go to the hospital you come out worse than when you went in.”

***

The Oct.2008 Kitts report clearly stated that the NHS - which has been run by the McGuinty Liberals for 5 years now - has been underfunded. Jim Bradley, the local Liberal MPP in St. Catharines, should be responding to these kinds of conditions in the hospital in Bradley’s own city; in the health-care monopoly which Bradley’s government runs.

What’s Bradley doing about these conditions? Is Bradley going to blame someone else, rather than himself and his own monopolist Liberal government which allowed conditions at the St. Catharines Hospital to deteriorate to this level?

What is Bradley’s response to Martin’s concerns?

Unsanitary, uncleaned blood-stained curtains in his hospital's ER, and Bradley blithely ignores this?

I guess it's another one of those "anomalies" and "anecdotes" of poor conditions in government-run, single-payer health monopolies that Bradley now downplays and sloughs off. After all, Bradley and McGuinty stand against the Americanization of health-care, doncha know! Of course, we all know what Bradley's response would have been had he been in opposition ...his sanctimony and blustering would have been unbearable. Now, Bradley says nothing, and does even less. Oh, but Bradley's being a busy beaver - he's building a new hospital, they say; what they won't say is how long will it take for the blood-splattered curtains to appear there too.

We’ve just seen Dr. Jack Kitts' report tell us what we knew, and what Bradley and his Liberals have been trying to conceal and deny: that the Liberals have underfunded the Niagara Health System.

The Kitts report had no mandate to reopen the NHS’S new proposed hospital’s location issue; nor did it have purview over the NHS’s organizational structure, nor to fully investigate the NHS’s finances. These items were pre-ordained by the Liberal government from the start.

At the end, the Kitts report really said not much more than we already knew going in: that the NHS was underfunded, and that the Liberal government was going to consolidate services to supposedly save money. The justification for the report was to somehow show that the NHS could climb out of its "deficit" (artificially created, let's not forget, by the Liberal’s own funding model!) by making some consolidation/changes – however at the end, really, the conclusion was that in the short run the NHS would still be in deficit, and would need further “cash infusions”.

So what did the report really accomplish? It merely rubber-stamped, in a quick show-trial, what the Liberal majority government had already decided.

Why did the Liberals make sure that the NHS’s funding model and the NHS’s finances were excluded from Kitt’s scrutiny? Do the Liberals have something to hide?

Why didn't the Liberals call the ombudsman to investigate the NHS immediately after CIHI released its Nov.29, 2007 study, which revealed that the NHS's St. Catharines General Hospital in Liberal MPP Jim Bradley’s own riding had the third-highest patient-mortality rate in Canada? (St. Catharines Standard, Dec.7, 2007)

Jim Bradley refuses to publicly explain the reasons for this high patient mortality-rate in his riding's own hospital.

Dr. Kitt’s limited-by-design report explains nothing whatsoever pertaining to the high NHS death-rate. The Liberals simply deny that there were/are any funding problems with their health care system. The Liberals denied that there was any link between their funding model and the high NHS patient death-rate – yet the Liberals hid and prevented any independent scrutiny of their claims or their system. Apparently, we’re just supposed to believe these secretive Liberals, as if they've never lied before.

If we don’t know what the Liberal health-care monopoly did at the NHS’s St. Catharines General Hospital, why should we believe that the same systemic problems will not continue at the new hospital?

What is Liberal MPP Jim Bradley hiding behind his health-care monopoly’s dirty curtains?