The decrepit conditions at St. Paul’s Hospital outlined in a report made public last week should raise questions about why the provincial Ministry of Health hasn’t moved to fix crumbling infrastructure at one of the region’s busiest health care centres, according to Spencer Chandra Herbert.
The NDP MLA for Vancouver-West End blasted the BC Liberals for not taking action to fix problems it has known about for at least seven years at the aging hospital.
“They’ve known about this since 2004 and yet here we are in 2011 and we’re really no farther ahead,” Chandra Herbert told WE in an interview last week.
A report commissioned by the Ministry of Health in 2003-04 classified five of the hospital’s six main buildings as being at risk for failure. Those findings and more were cited in a new report released last week by Providence Health Centre, the faith-based organization that runs St. Paul’s, which added chronically malfunctioning elevators, faulty electrical systems and back-up generators prone to failure to the litany of infrastructure issues facing the aging facility.
The conditions were outlined in Providence’s draft concept plan to renew the hospital on its current site in the West End at an estimated cost of $610 million.
An earlier proposal to build a new hospital near northeast False Creek was rejected by the Ministry of Health last summer. Yet Chandra Herbert said he and other advocates of renewing the hospital on site are still waiting for word from the province about whether it will commit to financing the hospital’s desperately needed upgrades.
“The longer we wait, the worse it gets,” he said.
However Chandra Herbert said he was “optimistic” the severity of the problems outlined by Providence would finally get government officials to “stand up and take notice.”
Brent Granby of the West End Residents Association and the Save St. Paul’s Coalition said he was extremely pleased with Providence’s draft plan for renewal, which includes a plan for a new ambulatory-care centre on Comox and Thurlow at a cost of nearly $400 million.
Compared to the nearly $1 billion estimated price tag of building a new hospital elsewhere, Granby said the plan makes good financial sense. But he shared Chandra Herbert’s concern that the Ministry of Health has yet to commit any funds to the renewal.
“That’s the huge frustration at this point, particularly for the length of time that we’ve been doing advocacy on this project,” said Granby.
He added his requests for BC Liberal leadership candidates to take a stance on St. Paul’s have been largely unanswered. “To me, this would be a legitimate public dialogue that they should talk about, that they should be committing,” he said.
Speaking in the legislature last week, Health Services Minister Colin Hansen said his ministry would look into the report “to determine exactly what needs to be done to make sure that St. Paul’s continues to provide the excellent health care that it has to British Columbians for the last hundred years.
