Sudbury Regional Hospital

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Sudbury Regional Hospital (SRH) is a hospital located in the city of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.

The SRH was established in the 1990s as part of provincial health care restructuring program by the Mike Harris government. The city formerly had three community hospitals, Sudbury General, Sudbury Memorial, and Laurentian Hospital, and one mental health and community service facility, Sudbury Algoma Hospital. The three hospitals officially amalgamated in 1997 into a single corporation, the Hôpital Régional de Sudbury Regional Hospital (HRSRH), but remained a multi-site facility. As a regional resource and referral centre servicing Northeastern Ontario, the SRH continues to provide hospital-based acute, transitional, rehabilitation and continuing care for over 600,000 residents across northeastern Ontario.

The SRH is currently undergoing a major expansion, which will consolidate all of its services on the former Laurentian Hospital site. However, the amalgamation remains controversial, with construction costs exceeding the original budget outlined by the province, and the project is not yet complete as of 2007.

[edit] Abduction incident

On November 1, 2007, a Kirkland Lake woman, Brenda Batisse, abducted a newborn baby girl from the SRH's St. Joseph's Health Care Centre site shortly before 1 p.m. Batisse spent several hours in the hospital building, dressed as a nurse, before taking the baby and leaving the premises.

The hospital immediately went into lockdown. A provincewide Amber Alert was issued, and all highways leading out of the city were roadblocked an hour after the incident. Batisse had already passed a roadblock location. She was subsequently arrested at her home in Kirkland Lake at 8:30 p.m.^[1], and the baby was returned to her mother unharmed.