Skip to main content

Hospitals re-admit 1 in 12 patients within 30 days


Hospital patients are being pushed out of hospital too quickly and hospital workers have long seen the sorry result for patients.  So it is not so surprising that the Canadian Institute for Health Information reports that 1 in 12 patients are back in an inpatient bed within 30 days of being discharged from hospital .

Canada is a low end outlier in terms of hospital beds, with half of the international norm for acute care on a per capita basis. Ontario is even lower, having cut 30,000 hospital beds in the last 30 years.  Ontario had three times more hospital beds per capita 30 years ago than it does now.   Accordingly, Ontario hospital bed occupancy is off the charts compared to other developed nations.   That in itself is very dangerous.

Worse, the Ontario government plans to cut hospital capacity further.  Ontario hospital inpatient capacity has fallen 33.5% in the last 15 years.  We now have the lowest hospital inpatient capacity per capita of all the provinces – indeed, even the next lowest province has quite a bit more capacity.

Ontario spends less per capita on health care than the rest of Canada.  This is entirely due to the low spending on the hospital sector.  

Health Minister  Deb Matthews continues to spin the nice sounding fairy tale that we can continue to cut hospital services simply by increasing home care (even while her government has reduced home health care services and slowed the increase in home support services).  The reality is the lack of adequate home care is only one small part of a much bigger problem.

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...