Naysayers biggest challenge to getting Vaughan hospital built, Mackenzie Health boss says

Yorkregion.com
May 14, 2014
Adam Martin-Robbins

The biggest challenge facing the Vaughan hospital right now is the doubt being sown in the community that it’s actually going to be built.

That’s the message Altaf Stationwala, president and CEO of Mackenzie Health, delivered to a group of more than 60 businesspeople and a few local politicians gathered at the Venetian Banquet & Hospitality Centre last Friday.

“I can’t tell you how hard it is to convince our staff to do double duty every single day, put in a shift and then spend the evenings or the mornings working on Mackenzie Vaughan hospital, only to hear from other members of the community that it’s not happening,” Mr. Stationwala, a Woodbridge resident, said during the question-and-answer segment of the Vaughan Chamber of Commerce event.

“This project’s happening. People are putting in blood, sweat and tears every single day to make this project a reality. And, I can tell you, when I look at other communities, I don’t see the resistance to a great thing, which is a civic initiative, ... a hospital. We just need to get behind it, we don’t need any negativity.”

He noted that in order to get the hospital up and running, the community must contribute about $200 million toward the more than $1-billion facility, projected to open by 2019.

Although, Mr. Stationwala said he wasn’t “playing politics,” his comments came in the first week of a provincial election campaign during which Progressive Conservative candidate Peter Meffe has been saying the hospital isn’t moving ahead under the Liberals, who granted approval for the project in June 2011 and triggered the planning work currently under way.

“This is a fairy tale. This approval has happened every election from 2007, when (former Health Minister) George Smitherman personally said to me, and others, it’s approved,” Mr. Meffe said in an editorial board meeting with The Citizen last week. “That was eight months after Humber River (hospital) was approved in 2006. ... Today, Humber River is out of the ground, the building is up, they’re fitting it out. Yet, Vaughan got approval in 2009 by (former Health Minister (David) Caplan; got approval in 2011, again, by (Health Minister Deb) Matthews; got approval, again, by Matthews in 2013. And now, it’s approved again for this election, but there’s no shovel in the ground.”

Doubt among some

That’s the message he’s been delivering since being nominated in January 2013.

And he’s not alone.

Local real estate developer Michael DeGasperis, chairperson of the Vaughan Health Campus of Care (VHCC) and one of Mr. Meffe’s key supporters, has been spreading the same message since his organization was squeezed out of the project a couple of years ago.

Mr. Meffe is the VHCC’s former vice-president of planning, a role he assumed less than a year after he lost his long-held city council seat in the 2010 municipal election.

The VHCC earlier this year launched a media campaign slamming the Liberal government for not completing the project and offering to fill the gap by building “top-tier health care services” on a portion of the city-owned lands around the future hospital, at Jane Street and Major Mackenzie Drive.

Liberal incumbent MPP Steven Del Duca, who is squaring off against Mr. Meffe in the June 12 election and was at the chamber of commerce meeting, has been adamant the hospital is going ahead, as promised.

“... I canvassed last night and people are delighted to know we are putting shovels in the ground in the fall of 2015 as we promised in 2011,” he said during an editorial board meeting last week with The Citizen. “We are on track to have the request for proposals launch in September of 2014, which then puts us into that formalized process so that we can have shovels in the ground in September of 2015.”

He said the provincial government has reiterated in every budget since 2011 that the Mackenzie Vaughan hospital is in its infrastructure funding plan.

The main focus of last Friday’s breakfast meeting was to update the local business community on the hospital project as well as to outline the expected number of jobs and potential business opportunities it will create.

And, once it’s up and running, the hospital is expected to employ more than 1,900 people, including 100 new physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, social workers, administrators and maintenance workers, among others.

Currently, the hospital corporation does business with more than 150 companies, including medical and dental imaging systems providers, linens suppliers and information technology companies.

Mr. Stationwala said that number is expected to grow with the opening of the new hospital.

Also highlighted during the meeting were four “first-in-Canada” innovations that Mackenzie Health has developed in partnership with the business community.

Among those are a new unit featuring smart beds and badges that allow for real-time, patient-to-nurse communication; smart hand hygiene stations that prompt caregivers to wash their hands as well as electronic signs and screens that provide real-time status updates and remote monitoring of patients.

Other innovations include: an electronic equipment monitoring and preventative-maintenance system; automated calls to the homes of discharged patients that trigger live follow-up calls by a nurse if necessary, and hospital-wide nursing best practices.