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April 2009 - Delta Hospital Fights the Good Fight
Fighting the good fight
Vancouver Sun
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Page A10
By Mary Frances Hill
It was the afternoon of Super Bowl Sunday 2002: a foggy, clammy day, a good day to stay home. Muriel Cullen and Jane Marynowski stood in the mist outside Delta Hospital, wondering whether anyone else would show up.
They and other volunteers had canvassed the community, asking people to join hands with them and form a circle around the hospital to draw attention to their campaign to restore the beds and services freshly cut by B.C.'s new Liberal government.
"We thought this was going to be a bomb," Cullen recalled.
And then people began to emerge silently from the fog, at first, one at a time.
Then there were dozens.
Finally, hundreds of people walked out of the mist.
It was the first substantial sign that there was hope for their campaign to restore acute care services to their community hospital, a goal that would take another six years to be realized.
For Cullen, a medical technologist at LifeLabs medical laboratories across the street from the hospital on Vantage Way, it all looked and felt like a Hollywood movie.
"My heart swells when I think out of this fog and this rainy day, people just started walking toward the hospital. It was such a good feeling."
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
The fall and rise of Delta Hospital began in December 2001, when good friends Cullen and Marynowski, an ER nurse at the hospital, took a long walk along the Fraser River. They talked, mostly about the rumours circulating about potential cutbacks at the hospital.
They hatched what seemed then to be a simple plan: Set up a "town hall" type of meeting to explore ways to pressure the government to reconsider.
The first meeting, held after the Hands Across the Hospital demonstration, attracted 3,000 people. It was clear: The community was ready to act.
"It went far beyond what we as volunteers thought we could accomplish," Cullen said.
Within weeks, it was official. A standing committee on health care reform, led by Delta South's own MLA Val Roddick, recommended centralizing the acute care beds in the region in Richmond, Surrey and Vancouver to avoid duplication of services. Roddick told The Vancouver Sun the changes had to be made because of dire finances and a shortage of nurses.
By spring 2002, Delta Hospital had lost all of its acute care and intensive care services, and had been downgraded to a sub-acute care facility.
That meant a wholesale removal of acute care beds for patients with non-life threatening illnesses, such as pneumonia, broken bones and appendicitis, and closing the emergency department at night.
With no acute care, no emergency department and no CT scanner, and the downgrading of so many services, the hospital would become little more than a day clinic, Marynowski said.
"It was frustrating for the whole community to have a government say that something you worked hard for 35 years ago is no longer required," said Doug Massey, who was active in Delta's municipal government in 1976, when the hospital first opened its doors.
Massey's roots run deep in Ladner. His late father George was the famous politician and namesake behind the Massey Tunnel and his mother, the late Lila Massey -- known affectionately as Dot -- was a founding member of the Delta Hospital Auxiliary group, which helped to build its fundraising thrift shop.
By the end of 2001, according to Marynowski, "our little hospital was pretty lean and our administration had already cut everything they could. So the community was really nervous."
The province argued it would be much less expensive and more efficient if health services were not duplicated from one community to the next.
But where the provincial government might have seen savings, the community saw vulnerability, and an opening for tragedy.
"It was a real monster of a situation, and unacceptable to the people of Delta," Massey recalled.
The changes would pose a risk to elderly patients with mobility problems, and they were anxious.
"You do your best to explain to them and reassure them what was going on," Cullen said, "but some of them were so afraid."
COMMUNITY ACTION AT WORK
Hands Across the Hospital was memorable and heart-tugging, but it was just one among a series of efforts by the entire community to raise money and build awareness that kept the pressure mounting on political decision-makers.
They distributed pins and lawn signs, which dotted nearly every yard.
They formed coalitions: the Save Delta Hospital Society, the Delta Health Coalition.
They compiled a petition with 31,000 signatures from the Ladner area.
The municipality of Delta, not mandated to wade into provincial affairs like health care, nevertheless held a referendum on restoring services at the hospital, with more than 60 per cent of voters in favour.
At the same time, financial forces were at work.
From 2002 on, the dearth of acute care beds forced moving patients by ambulance, accompanied by a nurse, to a hospital bed in Surrey or Vancouver.
Once the provincially funded ambulance service transferred the costs of those services to the regional district, the financial burden became immense. A series of simple ambulance trips to another hospital's acute care beds cost $1.5 million a year, Massey said, "not to mention the inconvenience, and the trauma of the people being transferred."
It was the speed with which the petition was written and the power it represented that impressed Marynowski the most. Within a month, the activists were able to produce 31,000 names on a petition to restore services. Massey, Marynowski, Cullen and other volunteers took it to Victoria, where Roddick presented it to the legislature.
It was Feb.14, 2002, a month after those 3,000 concerned, fearful and angry people showed up at that first community meeting.
"It was powerful to think we collected 31,000 names in such a short period of time, and within four weeks we brought it to Victoria," Marynowski said.
Presenting the petition in the legislature with Roddick's help was a high point in the relationship between politicians and volunteers.
Roddick looks back on that period as one of the most challenging of her two terms as MLA. She acknowledged voters were frustrated with what seemed to be the slow pace of her role in pushing the government to restore services.
"The community were very concerned about what could happen, and sure, I was the point man in all of this," said Roddick, who is not running for re-election. "But never once did I feel threatened, or that I couldn't deliver on this. I just knew everyone had to work together. And I can honestly say they were phenomenal."
Because so many disparate non-profit groups pledged their support, it was important to keep the battles as politically restrained as possible.
Try being apolitical in a fiery political situation, as it gets more and more intense. It's not easy, Cullen pointed out.
Ever the diplomats, Cullen and Marynowski say they prefer to remember both Roddick and then-health minister Colin Hansen for what they did for the effort, rather than the party-line decisions that so angered residents.
"Val Roddick did open doors and would never fail to see you when you needed to," said Cullen.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, SO FAR
Today, the volunteers look back at six years with a mix of satisfaction and exhaustion.
The proverbial war has been won.
This month, the hospital auxiliary celebrated its 40th anniversary.
Next month, the CT scanner room finally will be complete, thanks to fundraising within the community that was shepherded by the Delta Hospital Foundation.
In July 2008, Delta Hospital received $10 million from the provincial government to upgrade its acute care capacity.
By last November, it had been reinstated as an acute care facility, consisting of 40 beds, three of which are hospice beds. Today, it serves the community with an emergency department handling 20,000 visits a year, ambulatory care, chronic disease management, endoscopy, radiology, laboratory, and outpatient services and surgical day care.
"It's like a fairy tale, what these volunteers did," Roddick said.
Through the Delta Hospital Foundation, the community gave millions. Donations were used to update old equipment, create an appealing courtyard and renovate a surgical daycare unit.
"While the government was trying to shut things down, the community just kept on slugging away," Cullen said. "They never stopped."
Considering the intense six-year fight she entered with relative naivete, would they do it again? Marynowski doesn't hesitate to answer.
"I have so much respect for our community and what they contribute that, yes, I would do it again. Once a volunteer, always a volunteer."
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