Some hospitals are champions of local food (and some are just the opposite)

While Kingston General Hospital has plowed on with its plan to ship in meals manufactured (and sealed-up) in a distant factory, other hospitals are starting to make local food in their kitchens.

St. Joseph's Health Centre management in Guelph recently won an award from Ontario's Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation for being committed to high quality local food.

The satisfaction rate with food service at St. Joseph's rocketed to 87 per cent, compared to the provincial average of 60 per cent.

The local hospital dietary manager, Leslie Carson, told the Guelph Mercury that the main way she moved the opinion meter on her facility's food was by moving away from ready-prepared food.

Six years ago, when she arrived at St. Joseph's, ready-prepared food was all it served. Very little food was prepared on site. Good or bad, it had no soul.

Carson says staff took little pride in serving it. Having had nothing to do with its preparation, they had no ownership in it.

"I've found ready-prepared food to be expensive," she says. "Try eating it all the time. You'll go broke." Plus, with a lot of it being imported, the supply is vulnerable.

Thanks to the local-food movement maturing and distribution becoming more sophisticated, she's found a great deal of meat and produce can now be sourced from around Guelph.

As a result, about three-quarters of the 1,000 meals served by the facility today are prepared and cooked onsite by professional staff.

Local hospital union president Bonnie Weckworth confirms "we prepare up to 75% of all our food."

Unfortunately, not many other local CUPE hospital presidents can make that claim. But a survey of local CUPE presidents done by OCHU last year confirms that among those who can, food quality is consistently reported as high.

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 ...

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...

Are health care administrative expenses out of control in Ontario?

The Progressive Conservative government has justified its health restructuring plans with the claim that administrative expenses are much higher in Ontario than in Canada. When introducing the reforms, health minister Christine Elliott claimed , “Over the last five years, Ontario has spent 30% more than the Canadian average in administrative expenses on its health care system.” Elliott did not indicate her source of information. Presumably, however, the Progressive Conservatives are referring to the CIHI simplified and user friendly “ Your Health System ” graphs. Those graphs show “administrative expenses” in Ontario at 5.8% in Ontario while it is 4.5% in Canada. This CIHI measure is actually fairly narrowly defined. It is the percentage of “the legal entity’s” total expenses associated with the administrative, finance, human resources and communications functional centres. However “the legal entity” used for this estimate is [1] only...

Defend Public Healthcare

Search This Blog