Dialysis patients at the Royal Victoria Hospital will have to wait another six months before they can move to a new dialysis unit at the Lachine Hospital.

The McGill University Health Centre will be closing down the aging Royal Victoria Hospital in the downtown area over the next few months. A new mega-hospital is slated to open later this year.

Originally, the dialysis patients were slated to a satellite clinic on Decarie, close to the Glen campus.

Then the MUHC changed course and said patients would move to a satellite dialysis unit at Lachine Hospital, in the west end.

Now, that clinic won’t be ready on schedule, and the patients will have to remain at Royal Victoria even after the emergency room is shut down and personnel are gone.

Philippe Ouaknine, who has undergone dialysis for four years at the Royal Victoria Hospital feels that the unclear situation could lead to stress, on top of a possibly a difficult adjustment ahead for patients as they deal with entirely new staffs and facilities.

“I’ve been on dialysis for four years and the staff knows me well so this is also a big issue because we don’t know if they’ll stay with the same staff,” he said. 

Health Minister Gaetan Barrette said the delay is a mistake and said “the planning wasn’t perfect.”

Barette is guaranteeing outpatients will have access to emergency care should they need it.

“They will receive their services in the proper way,” said Barrette in a press conference Monday morning. “If emergency care has to be provided, that has been planned, but not exactly as it should have been.”

Lachine Hospital administrators say they need to set up the proper equipment for the unit to be in working order, and it should be ready by September 2015.

Oaknine said that he was mystified by some of the decisions taken in the dialysis care plan.

“There’s a lot of questions that I could ask to both the MUHC and the government, like why there’s only a small dialysis unit for inpatients, not ambulatory patients. It was a great opportunity to have a brand new dialysis unit there, a state of the art clinic," he said.