Kenora hospital bed squeeze tightens. On transitional beds and home care.

Patients who no longer need medical or surgical beds (ALC patients) now occupy about half of the medical and surgical beds at the Lake of the Woods Hospital in Kenora, according to the Miner and News.

Despite a rapidly aging population, the provincial government is slowing the development of new nursing home beds across the province. Some new transitional beds are being established in nursing homes, retirement homes, hospitals, and other facilities around the province, but not in sufficient numbers to stop the back up of patients in hospitals.

As a result, high bed occupancy constantly threatens the ability of the hospitals to treat new patients and provide adequate care.

"We've been fortunate that there hasn't been as much (admittance) as we had last fall and winter," said Mark Balcaen, the hospital CEO. "We're coping but at any moment, things could change. All you need is a four or five person surge to be admitted tonight and we're back to the crisis we were in last spring."

The government's official strategy emphasizes moving ALC patients to home or community care. Vice-president of nursing, Leslie Brown, however, questioned provincial assumptions over these alternative forms of care, suggesting that such services are under-resourced in Kenora.

"There's a new strategy called the Wait At Home Strategy that has a number of options in it," she said. "One of the problems in communities like ours and many communities in the Northwest is currently the resources in the community don't exist that support the Wait At Home strategy....A longer term strategy, waiting for that to happen in Kenora as more and more of our beds get filled with long term care patients is not going to work. What are we doing in the short term?"

dallan@cupe.ca

Comments

Too many public sector workers in Ontario?

Opponents of public services often try to portray the public sector as having grown disproportionately. In fact, since 1976, the number of public sector employees has not quite kept pace with the population. In 1976, the number of public sector employees in Ontario as reported by Statistics Canada averaged 830,800. By 2012, the number had increased to 1,330,700 -- a 60.2% increase. That sounds like significant growth -- true. But the population has increased from 8,413,779 in 1976 to 13,505,900 in 2012, a 60.5% increase. In other words, population growth has run slightly ahead of the growth in public sector employment. In 1976, close to 10% of the population worked in the public sector. It stayed pretty much this way until the Mike Harris government came to power when it dipped below 9%. It returned close to the historical range in the last six years or so, declining in 2012 to below the 1976 averag...

Huge cuts in public sector wages predicted

The Ontario Financial Accountability Office (FAO) says that, with inflation, real wages in the public sector will decline 11.3% over the three year period 2021/2 - 2023/4 . This would radically deepen the trend towards lower wages during the last ten years. The FAO reports that since 2011, the average annual salary for the Ontario public sector employees (defined here as employees of schools, colleges, provincial government, provincial agencies, and hospitals) has increased by $10,385 -- or 1.6 per cent on average annually. This is the lowest increase of all the sectors and lower than inflation, which averaged 1.8 per cent per year. Over the ten years that would be about a 2% pay cut. The FAO reports that wage settlements were the lowest in the provincial public sector over the last decade: Hospital Wages Especially Challenged: The FAO predicts hospital wages will increase even less than in the public sector -- just ...

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...

Defend Public Healthcare

Search This Blog