General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[ijmorlan]

The plan is to make this hospital a new super hospital.  It will be the only Emerg department in KW...  That's a problem. if it isn't central.

At this point, I would personally not characterize it as a "plan" yet, it's really more at the idea or concept stage. Plenty of things will be discussed and revised before actual plans are made.

Where does the idea that this would be the only Emergency department come from?

It’s a horrible, obviously stupid idea; but are we just speculating that the reason for the large land requirement is because services will be centralized (what’s it called if things are centralized into a non-central location?), or is there a concept document somewhere which proposes that Emergency should be consolidated?

There are at least 2 reasons I can think of off the top of my head why this level of consolidation is clearly inappropriate:

1. Travel time. Obvious, shouldn’t need further explanation.
   
2. Resiliency. What happens if an Emergency department has to close for some reason, such as fire, terrorist attack, pathogen outbreak, …?
   

This is sufficiently clear that if a supposed expert were to come out in favour of the consolidation, I would question the relevance of their expertise, not the points I make above.