Twenty-five thousand people gathered in Niagara Square Saturday, rallying to save Children's Hospital of Buffalo and protest Kaleida Health's plan to move the hospital from its current location and condense its operations to two floors of an existing facility.
Surrounded by City Hall, the Walter J. Mahoney State Office Building and the Federal Courthouse, speakers including current- and ex-Bills quarterbacks Alexander Van Pelt and Jim Kelly, and State Assemblyman Sam Hoyt (D-Buffalo, Grand Island) expressed their concern over the future of Children's.
"Consolidating Sabres and Bills makes about as much sense as consolidating an adult facility and Children's hospital," said Van Pelt.
Kelly criticized local officials' priority system, saying, "If they can find money to build the football stadium, they can find money to save Children's Hospital."
Kalida's plan stems from a recommendation by the Hunter Group, a health care consulting firm, to move facilities from Children's Bryant Street location into two floors of either the Millard Fillmore Gates Circle or Buffalo General Hospital.
Kaleida Health, formed in 1998 to alleviate the hospitals' financial difficulties, reported a $52.8 million loss last year, leading the Hunter Group to recommend consolidating Children's services with those of an adult care facility.
Three of the group's other hospitals - Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, DeGraff Memorial Hospital, and Millard Fillmore - would be transformed into "centers of excellence," specializing in specific areas of medical service. Under the plan, Buffalo General would remain a general care facility.
Supporters carried signs demanding that Kaleida put the people of Western New York before their financial bottom line and be held accountable for the social impact of its actions. Many signs depicted pictures of children who have suffered serious trauma and have been healed by the special care they received.
Numerous Children's doctors and nurses asked attendees to sign petitions to keep the Bryant Street location afloat. Heidi Keleher, a nurse in Children's pediatric intensive care unit, said many doctors were working the crowd on just four hours of sleep.
"Kaleida's plan to move Children's Hospital into two floors of an adult facility is just not acceptable," said Keleher. "The pediatric ICU I work in takes up one floor on its own. How do they plan on duplicating all the other specialty services we offer at this location in two floors?"
The decision to merge Children's with an adult facility comes from Hunter's study on the demographics of the Buffalo-Niagara area, which shows fewer people moving into the childbearing age than into an older age bracket.
Kaleida has noted in previous press statements that the John Hopkins and New England Medical Centers, The Mayo Clinic, UCLA Medical Center and Syracuse's University Hospital all contain children's hospitals on the same campus as adult facilities.
Parents eager to see Children's services continued were the central voices at the protest, relating their personal experiences with the hospital and the care their children received there. At the rally, Kelly spoke passionately of the circumstances leading to his strong affiliation with Children's.
Kelly and his wife told the crowd about their infant son, who suffers from Krabbe disease, a life-threatening enzyme disorder. The care he received from Children's allowed him to recently celebrate his fourth birthday, although he was expected not to live more than 14 months.
Buffalo native Ted Cheney's daughter Hope has undergone numerous surgeries and spent more than four months in the hospital after she was born two and a half months prematurely.
"Without Children's Hospital, Hope would be but a memory," said Cheney.
The March 11 deadline Kaleida originally gave the hospital's supporters for submitting a counter proposal has been pushed back to an unspecified later date. Children's sympathizers at the rally expressed hope that the extended deadline will allow them enough time to find a compromise and retain Children's as a separate facility.
"I want to see anything that will keep the Children's Hospital offering all that it does now," said Keleher. "We need to be able to continue to attract the limited number of pediatric doctors to our facility."
