HOSPITAL: Had wanted approval to renovate or relocate this year
Don Harrison
Province
CREDIT: Jason Payne, The Province Many West End residents want St. Paul’s to remain downtown.
Providence Health Care said its plans to renew or replace St. Paul‘s Hospital have been delayed while it also denied a land deal with a shadowy group fronted by private clinic directors is sinister.
The Roman Catholic organization, which owns several health-care facilities in Vancouver including St. Paul’s and Mount St. Joseph hospitals, had hoped to go to the ministry of health in 2005 to get initial approval for its plans to either renovate or move the iconic St. Paul’s on Burrard Street.
“We don’t have a firm time” now, said Providence spokesman Shaf Hussain on Friday.
Hussain said “a business case” has not been completed by Providence to pitch to Victoria.
“No decision has been made,” he added. But “even if we rebuild on the current site, we would have to comply with city” regulations.
Vancouver re-zoning bylaws require public consultation, and early opinion from West End residents has been strongly opposed to moving or downgrading the 111-year-old facility.
Meanwhile, the B.C. Health Coalition is concerned that Providence‘s $24.8 million “right of first refusal to purchase” deal signed with a virtually-unknown non-profit group called the Vancouver Esperanza Society is a step to privatization. The site is on railway land north of the Pacific Central bus depot and south of Prior Street.
“Who provided the money to purchase the new site?” asked coalition co-chair Joyce Jones.
CEO Carl Roy refused to answer directly, saying only at a Vancouver Coastal Health public meeting last week that the purchaser was a “third-party interest.”
Two of the society’s three directors have connections to the controversial Cambie Surgical Centre, while spokesman/surgeon Brian Day has repeatedly called for quicker care for those who can afford it and a law change to allow surgical overnight stays at clinics.
And although its constitution states a VES purpose is to “purchase property and construct a public health care facility,” it later admits that provision is “alterable.”
But Hussain downplayed any for-profit link, saying “there are lots of connections” in health care to private individuals such as doctors.
That did not satisfy the coalition’s Alice Edge, who said a St. Paul’s with a profit component would deliver service based first on shareholder, not medical, need — a reality studies claim has generally been the case with private-public hospital partnerships in the U.K.
© The Vancouver Province 2005