Ninety-one-year-old continues push for better health care in Fort Erie

At 91 years of age, Joy Russell continues her quest for better health care services for Fort Erie.

Her efforts began in the 1990s. She has got boxes and binders full of every letter she’s sent, every picture snapped and every step taken to save sites like the former Douglas Memorial Hospital in Fort Erie.

“I just never quit,” Russell said of her decades-worth of efforts.

Born in Ottawa, she and her family moved to Fort Erie about the beginning of the Second World War because her father, who was disabled, was looking for work.

He ended up employed at Fleet Aircraft, now Fleet Canada, and so did she and her mother after he died.

In her late teens, Russell joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. She laughed as she shared how she was only 17 when she enlisted, so she had to wait until her birthday to officially start.

Once she could, she was a fighter control operator and spent time working radar stations in the north.

“I’ve always been a fighter. I believe in our country. I believe in what we do, and I won’t step back and let anybody step on us.”

That fighting spirit carries over into her drive to keep viable health care options in communities such as Fort Erie.

She said she first saw a shift in health care coming during the 20 years she worked at the former Port Colborne hospital. Working as a department head, she said, there were meetings that made her start paying attention.

In 2009 she founded The Yellow Shirt Brigade. The group, recognizable by members’ bright yellow shirts with the word “no” in large, black capital letters on the front, held rallies at the health care facility, visited the provincial legislature in Toronto and did just about everything it could to save the facility and get the support of the community.

She admitted she didn’t pull her punches and laughed at some of the ways she worded her opinions.

“I wonder how I had the nerve to write some of the things I wrote.”

Other letters were written to councils in neighbouring municipalities and even other provinces to get their backing. She said despite positive correspondence and support from those groups and individuals she wrote to, it wasn’t enough.

The Fort Erie hospital with its emergency room was converted to an urgent care centre by Niagara Health in September 2009.

Now, with a new modern hospital being built in Niagara Falls that’s slated to open in 2028, Niagara Health plans to close down its urgent care centres in Fort Erie and Port Colborne.

In more recent years, with the deaths of many members of The Yellow Shirt Brigade, Russell has joined forces with Heather Kelley and her group Fort Erie Healthcare SOS to fight for the urgent care centre.

In early July, the group celebrated what was Douglas Memorial’s 95th anniversary with a cake outside the building. There are other demonstrations and rallies planned.

One thing Russell struggles to understand is why Douglas Memorial was closed and turned into an urgent care centre.

Reading from one of her letters, she said the hospital had no debt, low costs and was a leading facility in the province.

“We had a perfectly operational hospital working here,” she said. “When they started all their grandiose plans with the bigger hospitals, and they were closing us down and Port Colborne…(they) just left us with nothing.”

She even went as far to say “they put us in danger.”

Her concern stems from more than just the harsh Fort Erie winter weather that can make roads dangerous to travel. It’s also the distance from her town to a proper hospital.

She recalled a story of a young girl from Ridgeway who died on the way to an out-of-town hospital because of the time it took for paramedics to reach and then transport her.

To Russell, having a hospital in Fort Erie is not a want but a definitive need. She feels something like a “cottage hospital” would be sufficient. That kind of hospital, she said, has beds and people are often treated by their own doctor when admitted.

“I’m just discouraged, you know? I don’t get discouraged that often, but it just seems like we have no say.”

Despite that, Russell has no regrets and doesn’t plan to give up her fight to save the urgent care centre. Or, perhaps more aptly, to get the hospital back.

“I’ll continue doing it as long as I live.”

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