Kenora Lake of the Woods Hospital: "coming into gridlock"

The Lake of the Woods Hospital has lost its bid to extend its 1A bed crisis designation, which gave hospital in-patients priority for any long-term care beds that became available, the Miner & News reports. The crisis designation had already been extended once.

The hospital bed crisis began in February with 15 patients in hospital beds awaiting beds in long-term care homes. Hospital president Mark Balcaen said there are now13 such patients. A similar crisis in 2010 was lifted when eight such patients remained at the hospital.

"We have serious bed shortages within the hospital and we have a very large number of people awaiting a bed in town. The 1A status is about the only thing available to us to help alleviate the bed problems at the hospital," Balcaen said. "What we feel is appropriate here — and we thought the LHIN (Local Health Integration Network) had agreed as well — is we were in crisis when we had eight or more patients."

Hospital chief of staff Dr. Kerry MacDonald says, "It seems the Ministry (of Health & LTC) and the Local Health Integration Network do not like A1 status because it is embarrassing and it ought to be embarrassing. If it does end, I have no understanding on what basis the LHIN is making this judgement. We are in a marginally better situation than when we went into A1 Crisis status but our acute beds remain at virtually 100 per cent occupancy... I can see us coming into gridlock with patients in the emergency room that we can not find beds for if this changes just a little bit."

It's good to see some hospital leaders still have enough guts to speak up for their local communities. Many don't.

OCHU Area 7 vice-president Judy Bain says, "This is devastating. We are operating at 100%, but we are only staffed for about 80%. We need to find a permanent resolution. We shouldn't have to keep going back and beg for favours. Now we even have to ship some angio patients to Hamilton. Is that good care? It's getting hard to go to work."

A LHIN spokesperson called the reduction of Alternate Level of Care patients in the hospital over the past eight weeks "substantial" and committed to working with "key stakeholders on local strategies."

Comments

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 in Ontario in 2022/3, up from 47,543 in 2021/2.

More spending on new hospitals and new beds? Nope

Hospital funding: There is something off about the provincial government's Budget claims on hospital capital funding (funding to build and renovate hospital beds and facilities). For what it is worth (which is not that much, given the long time frame the government cites), the province claims it will increase hospital capital spending over the next 10 years from $11 billion to $20 billion – or on average to about $2 billion per year. But, this is just a notional increase from the previous announcement of future hospital capital spending. Moreover, even if we did take this as a serious promise and not just a wisp of smoke, the government's own reports shows they have actually funded hospital infrastructure about $3 billion a year over the 2011/12-2015/16 period. So this “increase” is really a decrease from past actual spending. Even last year's (2016-17) hospital capital funding increase was reported in this Budget at $2.3 billion - i.e. about 15% more th

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 33,778 full t

Defend Public Healthcare

Search This Blog