Opinion: Letters, Sept. 2
Many challenges to reopening ERs
Re: NDP commits to reopening three Winnipeg ERs closed by Tories (Aug. 29)
I am a recently retired architect. My 35-plus-year career was devoted to health-care architecture in Canada, predominantly in Manitoba.
I was the principal architect on such important work as the HSC Crisis Response Centre project (mental health emergency department); Victoria General Hospital (VGH) Emergency Department; Cancer Care; St. Boniface Hospital Emergency Department Redevelopment Master Plan (predesign) Feasibility Study; and Seven Oaks Emergency Department Redevelopment project of 2012, to name a few.
Accordingly I read the Free Press article (Aug. 29) about reopening the emergency rooms with great interest. Some of what I read was surprising. When the government closed the emergency departments at VGH, Concordia and Seven Oaks, I recall the emergency department ‘infrastructure’ was all quite new. VGH was logically based on a program that identified a significant increase in patient load from an expanding catchment area. It was also recognized that VGH needed to expand its surgical recovery stretchers and (separately) its ICU beds — envisioned with a future ICU expansion on the west (rear side) of VGH. The emergency department was designed for acute care and had a separate minor treatment area.
Seven Oaks was also programmed and designed on similar logic, with both acute care and minor treatment areas. Concordia was extremely tight due to physical and functional site constraints, which limited its potential size and capacity at the time.
I don’t know what has been done to the infrastructure since the emergency department closures. Have these emergency departments been completely gutted with some completely new, non-emergency department functions? I would be surprised if that was the case. Anyway, I cannot imagine how — according to the Free Press article — “each new emergency room would cost about $150 million” unless all the previously new emergency department infrastructure was completely gone and starting at square one all over!
I fully appreciate the challenge with any emergency department — which are often the main entry point of any acute care facility — is they can only function efficiently if there is adequate emergency department staff; adequate access to diagnostic lab and imaging; available medical specialists; available in-patient beds (to move admitted patients out of the emergency department); and more long-term care beds. It seems that Grace, St. Boniface, and HSC don’t have the inpatient bed capacity and my experience suggests an HSC bed tower replacement will take 10 years at best!
I also appreciate that nothing is static in health care and needs change over time. However reopening Victoria General and Seven Oaks (at least) makes some sense to me — if the efficiency requirements for a successful emergency department can be met soon.
James G. Orlikow MAA (Retired)
Winnipeg
RIP Serenity
Re: Mooving Moonshadow forward (Aug. 26); Former dairy cow got chance to live free (Think Tank, Aug. 28)
The article contained a mountain of information regarding a second-generation dairy farm in Manitoba.
The details that were noticeably absent from this article, were inadvertently covered by another article, on Serenity the cow, and are often glossed over by the dairy industry.
These details aren’t pretty and are standard operating procedure on dairy farms in Manitoba.
Serenity’s commemoration reveals a 13-year farm life that included pain, stress and misery.
Serenity was kept continually pregnant, and likely had 10-plus babies, including one (her last) she was forced to birth with a fractured pelvis.
Dairy cows have their calves taken away almost immediately after birth and both the mothers and babies are inconsolable and in distress, calling for each other for several days.
Serenity’s last birth, while injured, marked the end of her days on the dairy farm.
She couldn’t have withstood another injury, and since it’s illegal to transport a downed cow to slaughter, the farmer relinquished her to The Little Red Barn Sanctuary, where she was able to live another three years, with reprieve, with other industry survivors, free, well cared for and loved by all. Rest in peace Serenity.
Diane Youngman
Winnipeg
Keep safe, off the road
Re: Political staffer’s lead foot “human error” (Aug. 30)
So the former high-ranking political officer Jordan Sisson, who was going to run in the upcoming provincial election, has changed his mind.
He states it is because he wants to spend more time with his family.
Here is hoping spending time with his family doesn’t include spending time in the car.
Janice Chase
Stonewall
Sympathy for the addicted
Re: Decriminalization: How police drug seizure, even without arrest, can create harms (Aug. 31)
I once was one of those who, while sympathetic, would look down on those who’d ‘allowed’ themselves to become addicted to alcohol and/or illicit ‘hard’ drugs.
Yet I, albeit not in the fentanyl-use category, have suffered enough unrelenting PTSD-related hyper-anxiety to have known, enjoyed and appreciated the great release upon consuming alcohol and/or THC.
Neglecting and therefore failing people struggling with debilitating drug addiction should never have been an acceptable or preferable political or religious option.
But the more callous politics that are typically involved with lacking addiction funding/services tend to reflect conservative electorate opposition, however irrational, against making proper treatment available to low- and no-income addicts.
It really is as though some people, unlike most other people, are actually considered disposable. Even to an otherwise relatively civilized nation, their worth is measured basically by their sober ‘productivity’ or lack thereof. Those people may then begin perceiving themselves as worthless and accordingly live their daily lives and consume their substances more haphazardly.
Tragically, many chronically addicted people won’t miss this world if they never wake up. It’s not that they necessarily want to die; it’s that they want their pointless corporeal hell to cease and desist.
Frank Sterle Jr.
White Rock, B.C.
Dyer misreads Russia
Re: China should heed lessons from Russia (Think Tank, Aug. 30)
Gwynne Dyer’s opinion piece comparing Russian and Communist Chinese motivations for invasion seems to have serious flaws.
Putin does want to be ‘Czar of all the Russias’ to cement his place in Russian history. The leadership of mainland China find Taiwan to be unfinished business ever since the Nationalists fled there after losing the Chinese civil war. The success of capitalism and democracy in Taiwan are also major irritants.
Putin does have expansionist goals — the Baltic states the USSR annexed in 1940, as well as the other former Soviet Socialist Republics. Having a common border with Russia was a real liability until NATO began expanding to contain the Russian threat.
China has only Taiwan as a goal — despite never having ruled the island. That in itself is a deterrent.
But having a wish list does not mean that Russia or China are currently intent on world domination. The claim that it’s a reigning western historical myth that aggression by world powers must be stopped early is … itself a myth. The West, composed of democracies that require consensus before acting, have been slow to react in a meaningful way (or at all) as in, say, Czechoslovakia.
Oddly, Mr. Dyer’s commentary concludes that sanctions imposed on aggressors because of this ‘myth of a myth’ are the deterrents that prevent invasions, or make them unsustainable.
Allan Robertson
Winnipeg
Credit: Opinion: Letters, Sept. 2
