PV staff
A new report by CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU/CUPE) says that Ontario’s hospital capacity crisis will worsen in the coming years as government funding is too low to even maintain current levels of service.
OCHU/CUPE president Michael Hurley said that the report titled ‘No Respite: Ontario’s failure to plan for hospital patients’ shows that service levels are plummeting, and that Ford government’s systemic underfunding means the situation is deteriorating.
“There is a massive gap between what Ontarians need and what this government plans to do. People are already paying the consequences for the Ontario PC policy of scarcity and it’s only going to get worse: we’ll see longer wait times, more patients on stretchers in hallways and fewer staff to provide care.”
The union says that by 2032, Ontario will have a shortfall of 13,800 hospital beds and more than 80,000 staff. Just to maintain current levels of service, the government needs to boost annual hospital funding by $2 billion.
“Hallway healthcare” spiking under Ford Conservatives
Ontario Health data indicates that the number of patients receiving “hallway healthcare” – treatment in hospital hallways, storage closets and other unconventional spaces – grew by 25 percent since the Ford Conservatives were first elected in June 2018.
“In 2018, Ford said he would end hallway healthcare. In 2024, he’s joking about veterinary hospitals handling overflow,” said Hurley. “It begs the question: has this government given up on the hospital crisis? What is their plan to address the suffering of people due to the state of our under-resourced hospitals?”
The OCHU/CUPE report also notes that the lack of new long-term care beds is compounding the hospital capacity crisis. Since the Tories came to power in 2018, the waitlist for LTC has increased by 20 percent.
Average wait-time up sharply
Since June 2023, the average wait-time for hospital admission rose nearly 7 percent from 17.8 hours to 19 hours. In addition, over the period, only around one quarter of patients admitted to hospital via emergency rooms have been within the government’s own target time of 8 hours.
A significant factor in this is the looming staff shortage in Ontario’s hospital sector. While the government publicly insists that it is adding hospital staff, the real numbers tell a different story: across the province, more than 22,000 jobs remain unfilled, with vacancies up 17 percent over the past year and a breathtaking 534 percent since 2015.
OCHU/CUPE says that government claims to have “added 30,000 nurses” in the past two years only count new registrants without accounting for nurses who have deregistered or have stopped practicing. In fact, data from the College of Nurses from August 2024 shows that the number of practicing nurses has only increased by 11,263. OCHU/CUPE says that Ontario, which has the lowest hospital staffing levels in Canada, needs to hire 34,000 more hospital workers just to match the rest of the country.
Privatization needs to be stopped, reversed
Ontario Communist Party leader Drew Garvie says the underfunding and staffing crises are all part and parcel of Ford’s drive to privatize healthcare in the province.
“In late 2022, the government announced the expansion of private health clinics, which contradicted their election promise, and facilitated that expansion through Bill 60,” Garvie told People’s Voice. “Among other things, that legislation introduced categories of lesser-skilled, lower-waged health workers, putting downward pressure on healthcare quality and wages. This particularly affects women, who make up 80 percent of healthcare workers in Ontario.”
Garvie notes that expanding private clinics also means staff will be increasingly poached from the public sector which is already experiencing a staffing crisis. “Privatization has further strained public healthcare resources, since underfunding and privatization are interlinked issues. The Ontario Health Coalition highlighted this in its healthcare referendum campaign in 2023. The fact is, privatization not only increases costs but also reduces the quality and accessibility of healthcare. Ford’s plans must be exposed and opposed by mass mobilization. People in Ontario need public healthcare to be protected, properly funded, and expanded to include full and universal coverage for dental, vision, pharmaceuticals and long-term care.”
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