Skip to main content

Now where is the other $71.8 M in new hospital funding going?

Ministry of Health and media reports place the total hospital funding increase announced Friday to reduce Emergency Room (ER) wait times at $100 million for 74 hospitals.  

Above and beyond the $28.2 million for short stay beds discussed earlier, that leaves $71.8 million for other ER projects. 

The Ministry says that another $47.4 million will be distributed among the 74 hospitals to fund other projects to decrease ER wait timesThis would include new hospital initiatives and initiatives already underway.  Which means that at least some of this new money will not result in any new capacity at the hospitals.   

The Ministry cites these as examples of activities that could be funded: 
  • Expanding  and reorganizing ER staff;  
  • Creating ER rapid assessment zones; 
  • Renovating ERs to improve patient flow. 
The Ministry also notes $10.3 million to reduce the time ER patients spend waiting for an initial assessment, and $14 million in "variable incentive funding" to reward qualifying hospitals for treating more patients within established targets. 

So there were also funding announcements for other hospitals on Friday "to reduce ER wait times": Royal Vic (in Barrie), $1.3 million, Quinte Health, $1.2 million; Peterborough Regional, $1.1 million; Grand River, $935 K; St. Mary's, $765 K, Cambridge Memorial, $782 K; and Brantford General, $250K.  

But it is not clear (to this writer) that any of these funding announcements will result in extra beds.  At Peterborough Regional the funding reportedly will go to making improvements in triage, shifting physician scheduling to match peak volumes and increasing the amount of doctors on regular schedules.  

In any case, the $100 M is  a fair scoop of cash: about 0.5% total funding increase for hospitals.   

And if there really is $100 million coming to improve ER service, the list of hospitals that will get some of it will have to grow by quite a bit. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ford government fails to respond to 72% increase in COVID inpatient days, deepening the capacity crisis

COVID infections continue to drive up hospital costs and inpatient hospitalizations in Ontario. For the most recent fiscal year (April 1, 2022- March 31, 2023) hospital stays related to COVID cost $1.221 billion, according to new CIHI data.   This is about 4% of total hospital spending, creating a very significant new cost pressure beyond the usual pressures of population growth, aging, inflation, and rising utilization.   Costs for COVID related hospitalizations increased 22.2% in Ontario in 2022/23 from the previous fiscal year, rising from $999 million to $1.221 billion.  That rise is particularly notable as the OMICRON spike of late 2021 and early 2022 had passed by the the 2022/23 fiscal year.   The $222 million increase in COVID hospitalization costs came in the same year as the Ford government cut special COVID funding and, in fact, cut total hospital funding by $156 million.     In total, there were 60,653 COVID hospitalizations...

The long series of failures of private clinics in Ontario

For many years, OCHU/CUPE has been concerned the Ontario government would transfer public hospital surgeries, procedures and diagnostic tests to private clinics. CUPE began campaigning in earnest against this possibility in the spring of 2007 with a tour of the province by former British Health Secretary, Frank Dobson, who talked about the disastrous British experience with private surgical clinics. The door opened years ago with the introduction of fee-for-service hospital funding (sometimes called Quality Based Funding). Then in the fall of 2013 the government announced regulatory changes to facilitate this privatization. The government announced Request for Proposals for the summer of 2014 to expand the role of "Independent Health Facilities" (IHFs).  With mass campaigns to stop the private clinic expansion by the Ontario Health Coalition the process slowed.   But it seems the provincial Liberal government continues to push the idea.  Following a recent second...

The hospital crisis: No capacity, no plan, no end

While Canada has achieved universal public healthcare coverage, that does not mean conservative forces have given up trying to erode that coverage and expand corporate care where it does not currently exist. The battle has become particularly intense in Ontario under the Ford Progressive Conservative government, which is implementing serious cuts to the level of care and moving to bring in for-profit mini-hospitals. Inadequate Staffing.   Less and less of hospital spending is on staff.   Employee compensation as a share of hospital expenditures has consistently shrunk in Ontario. This is not some immutable law of hospital development.  It is in stark contrast with the rest of Canada, where compensation has become a larger share and now accounts for 67.1%. Hospitals in provinces other than Ontario now have 18 percent more staff per capita than hospitals in Ontario. Overall, if Ontario had the same staffing capacity as the other provinces and territories, there would be another...