CORRECTION: Ontario has THE LOWEST acute care beds per capita

We said Friday in our media release that Ontario had fewer acute care beds per capita than any other developed country – except for Mexico.

That was based mostly on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data we had available at the time (which reports figures only for countries as a whole).

I have had a chance to look more closely at the numbers and, in fact, Ontario has FEWER acute care beds per capita than any developed country INCLUDING MEXICO!

Ontario has 18,355 acute care beds (2010 report) and a population of 13,210,677, for a ratio of 1.39 beds per thousand population. That ratio is down from 2009, when we had 18,773 acute care beds and a ratio of 1.42 beds per 1,000 population. In 2008 we also had a ratio of 1.42.

Mexico, which has the lowest ratio of any developed country as a whole, has 1.6 beds per thousand (OECD report for years 2008 and 2009).

This, of course, makes our case for more hospital beds stronger.

We truly are an outlier, well below the Canadian average (of 1.8 in 2008), and far below the OECD average (of 3.6 in 2008).

Canada as a whole has 26.8% more acute care beds per capita than Ontario (using the 2008 data), while the OECD countries have, on average, 153.5% more.

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