A demonstration took place outside Montreal’s Lachine Hospital on Saturday afternoon after McGill University’s health center, which is creating a work challenge, announced it would close emergency and critical care units in particular.
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Citizens, doctors, nurses and hospital workers are therefore mobilizing to save the hospital community profession and demanding that these hospital services remain accessible and public.
“Basic care is provided in this hospital,” announced Shiaman Diawara, President of SECUSM. “It’s normal for the public to be concerned because we don’t know where the journey is going with the partial closure of the ER and for the future of the hospital.”
MARIO BEAUREGARD/QMI AGENCY
For its part, the MUHC claims that Lachine Hospital has been facing staffing problems for several years and, for these reasons, would like to reassess the hospital’s mission.
It therefore closes the emergency service from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m., patient transports are diverted to other hospitals.
MARIO BEAUREGARD/QMI AGENCY
“Closing our emergency room here will help increase traffic in the already overcrowded emergency room in the west of the island,” explains Lachine District Mayor 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 do not understand.”
The work of the modernization project of the Lachine Hospital, which amounts to more than 220 million dollars, will take its course and will aim to offer the population quality and avant-garde care.
MARIO BEAUREGARD/QMI AGENCY