In my previous blog I wrote about the dangerous decline of small hospitals in Ontario’s rural communities. Services like surgery and obstetrics are being packed up and moved wholesale to urban centres, forcing rural patients to travel long distances to access care. You might think that urban hospitals are the winners in this equation. After all, when they “merge” with a smaller hospital they get to help themselves to an entire department’s worth of equipment, staff and patients. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Urban hospitals are also losers in the redistribution of health care, as are urban patients.