In 2012, then Finance Minister Dwight Duncan established a Task Force to explore the community’s need and desire for a New Single-Site Acute Care Hospital for Windsor-Essex. This was after both acute care organizations presented different plans in 2008/09 that continued a bifurcated system for the governance and delivery of acute care in Windsor-Essex. Dave Cooke, Tom Porter and then MPP Teresa Piruzza, were selected to lead this important community discussion.
After months of public consultation which included numerous discussions with community agencies, local healthcare experts and open house discussions with residents of Windsor-Essex, the Task Force concluded there was a “strong level of endorsement and enthusiasm in the Windsor-Essex region for the development of a new single site acute care hospital”. Click here to view the Task Force report.
After the historical realignment occurred between Hotel Dieu Grace Hospital and Windsor Regional Hospital a Program and Services Steering Committee was appointed to move the planning forward and has offered the public numerous opportunities to participate in the discussion.
By the numbers:
- 150+ medical experts and community members were directly involved in the creation of the Phase 1A report.
- 30+ Town halls/community speaking engagements were held in over the last two years.
- 4 Phone-in shows/town hall broadcasts on AM 800.
- 594 residents of Windsor-Essex provided online feedback about criteria used to select a site.
- 100s more shared their thoughts in person, through email, on phone, at public events.
- 22 property owners or groups submitted sites for consideration.
- 75 residents of Windsor-Essex submitted applications to be part of the voluntary site selection subcommittee.
- 10 volunteer members from Windsor-Essex, spent a combined total of 1500 hours going over 32 community-driven criteria for each of the 22 sites before choosing the best possible site.
- 1 site was selected through a process which was deemed to be “fair and commendable” by a Fairness Advisor.
If you would like to host a community event or discussion, please click here and fill out the attached form.
Windsor Regional Hospital 
The numbers don’t disclose how or if public input was gathered in any way or if that input was used to formulate criteria for site selection. For instance more than 1/3rd of your survey respondents indicated a hospital close to downtown was important but that didn’t seem to make it into the criteria outlined in the RFP. I’ve personally been to about 5 or 6 of these public engagement sessions and never once have I witnessed anyone taking in information or concerns brought forward by the public, in fact just about every time a criticism was made it was immediately refuted on the spot. How can anyone call this substantive consultation?
Thanks for your ongoing comments and being engaged in this process.
From your own statistics that means 2/3rds of the respondents did not consider having the regional state-of-the-art acute care hospital in the “downtown” was important. The great majority of individuals wanted the acute care hospital in the best possible location for current and future patients. The site selection committee stepped forward, got actively involved and spent countless hours in this process and should be commended for achieving that result.
Feedback from any of the public consultation sessions were shared with the Planning and Services committee. For example, the feedback received from the community on the draft criteria directly amended the criteria and was used to weight the criteria.
Again, we appreciate and have stated many times that not everyone will be pleased with the new regional acute care hospital location.
However the overall system announcement that included the new regional state of the art acute care hospital, the urgent care centre at the former Grace site, the mental health investments at the Ouellette campus and the additional health care investments at the Tayfour campus, has been met with a lot of support from the Windsor-Essex community.
We are closing in on 4 years of community engagement on Stage 1 of this 5 stage process. It is time to move forward to ensure these needed investments in hospital infrastructure becomes a reality for Windsor-Essex.
We look forward to you being part of moving this project forward along with the majority of Windsor-Essex residents.
I’m sorry but its irresponsible and a major assumption to suggest that if 1/3rd of the survey respondents felt it important enough to write in a comment that proximity to downtown was important to them that the other 2/3rds wish the hospital to be far from downtown?
An analogy… I read a report once that stated for 60% of first time home buyers a “safe neighbourhood” was the most important criteria. I suppose using a your form of logic that the other 40% wish to live in an unsafe neighbourhood?
The very fact that over 1/3rd of respondents felt they needed to write in that criteria should have been an indicator that locating this hospital with reasonable proximity to downtown was important to many people.
As for your delivery of comments and feedback to the site selection committee, can you elaborate how that was done? Once again I don’t recall seeing anyone collecting information, I don’t recall ever even seeing anyone with a pad of paper and a pen. This type of casual “consultation” isn’t good enough.
Thanks again for the comment. We will once again answer your question regarding the location of the new regional state-of-the-art acute care hospital.
Please read the answer your last question. We stated “the great majority of individuals wanted the acute care hospital in the best possible location for current and future patients”. That is what has occurred.
All $2 billion dollars of the proposed investment occurs within the City of Windsor. However, county residents are being asked to support approximately $100M of the local share of this investment. The reaction to the overall proposal has been very positive.
In the downtown core will be some $300M of proposed investments in the urgent care centre at the former Grace site and mental health investments at the Ouellette site.
As we have stated, the location of the new hospital would not make everyone happy. Clearly, you are one of the individuals that is not happy. That is unfortunate however we would ask that we need to focus on the patients of the region.
The feedback we are receiving regarding the overall plan is very positive and we will be actively moving the project forward for the benefit of the patients of our region.
What the numbers don’t disclose is that the majority of the volunteer members mentioned above have a non arms-length relationship with the Board of WRH. Four of them are current directors of the WRH Board of Directors and two more are former Chairs of the Board.
Also, in his report, the Fairness Advisor noted that he had no role in the choice of the assessment criteria or their weightings.
http://www.wrh.on.ca/Site_Published/AcuteCare/RichText1.aspx?Body.QueryId.Id=57560&LeftNav.QueryId.Categories=774
http://www.wrh.on.ca/Sithttp://www.wrh.on.ca/Site_Published/wrh_internet/Document.aspx?Body.Id=65858e_Published/wrh_internet/Document.aspx?Body.Id=65858
Thanks again for your ongoing comments and your ongoing direct involvement in our community engagement process. All members of the site selection committee are volunteers and residents of Windsor-Essex. Board members of Windsor Regional Hospital are residents of Windsor-Essex and are uncompensated volunteers and spend not only thousands of hours dedicating their time to advancement of healthcare in our region, but also some of them provided even more time to this process. They should be commended for their dedication to healthcare in Windsor-Essex. Any allegation of anything else is inappropriate and unfounded.
We had 75 individuals apply to sit on the site selection committee. Even more applied to sit on the site selection committee but submitted their applications too late.
The committee worked not only with the Fairness Advisor but with Stantec Consulting and Agnew Peckham who have thousands of hospital planners and years of expertise at their disposal. They are the experts who supported the site selection committee during their over 1500 hours of collective review.
As stated by the experts this process was the most inclusive, transparent and open site selection process they have ever been involved with. We should thank and applaud the site selection committee for their dedication. We also should thank all of those individuals who sent in their timely applications to sit on the committee. They were willing to, or actually dedicated their time to be part of an exciting process for Windsor-Essex. Those who did not sit on the committee and others will be called upon to become part of the ongoing community engagement when we start to get into the detailed planning and design the various facilities.
The site selected will make some people happy and others will not be happy. However, overall the response to the Windsor-Essex Hospital healthcare plan has been very positive.
This includes a new state-of-the-art acute care hospital, a new Urgent Care Centre at the former Grace site, mental health investments at the Ouellette campus and additional investments at the Tayfour campus.