A demonstration took place Saturday afternoon in front of the Lachine Hospital in Montreal after the McGill University Health Center, which evokes a labor challenge, announced that it wanted to close emergency and intensive care, in particular .
Citizens, doctors, nurses and hospital employees are therefore mobilizing to save the community vocation of the hospital and demand that these hospital services remain accessible and public.
“It is essential care that is given in this hospital”, proclaims Shiaman Diawara, president of the SECUSM. “It’s normal for the population to be worried because we don’t know where we’re going with the partial closure of the emergency room and for the future of the hospital.”
MARIO BEAUREGARD/QMI AGENCY
The MUHC, for its part, maintains that the Lachine Hospital has been experiencing workforce challenges for several years and wishes, for these reasons, to reassess the hospital’s mission.
It will therefore close the emergency service from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m., ambulance transport will be redirected to other hospitals.
MARIO BEAUREGARD/QMI AGENCY
“If our emergency closes here, it will contribute to increasing the traffic in the already crowded emergency rooms in the west of the island”, explains the mayor of the Lachine borough, Maja Vodanović. “We have a project that we have been working on for ten years and now we are questioning the usefulness of the emergency. We don’t understand.”
The work of the Lachine Hospital modernization project, amounting to more than $220 million, will follow its course and will have as its mission to offer the population high quality and avant-garde care.
MARIO BEAUREGARD/QMI AGENCY
