Skip to main content

ER Crisis: 221 short stay hospital beds to be funded across province!

Here's a modest victory for supporters of public health care.  The Ministry of Health and LTC announced that London Health Sciences Centre will operate 21 new short-stay beds.  Another 23 hospital will also get such beds.   
The short-stay beds will be located in hospital in-patient wards and only patients admitted through the ER will have access to these beds – where they may stay up to 72 hours before being discharged or transferred to another unit in the hospital. The beds are designed to help improve the flow in ERs.
The Ministry adds the following:
  • Short-stay beds have been introduced in response to the work of Dr. David Walker, Provincial Lead, Alternate Level of Care (ALC), who is helping to ensure that ALC patients receive care in the right setting.
  • Across the province, 221 beds in 24 hospitals will be funded as part of the short-stay program.
This sounds like a positive first step to address dangerously high hospital bed occupancy and the back-ups in the ERs.  For the London news story click here.  No word yet on which other 23 hospitals will receive new beds.  Stay tuned.  

Comments

  1. You can be sure this is only temporary until after the fall elections.

    This proves, without a doubt, hospitals across the province have been cutting beds and frontline staff recklessly and prematurely, prior to having the proper enablers in place, such as adequate LTC beds.

    In Niagara they have cut two ERs and have discovered ER wait times are now way above the provincial average and ambulance offload delays are soaring, basically because of lack of hospital beds and frontline staff.

    Recently to address this serious, potentially dangerous situation, they are implementing Xcess Plan......which is opening up extra beds in the hospital and staffing them.

    To devise this deceitful strategy, they tell us they need the best and the brightest and that is why they must be paid the highest "Sunshine" wages.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for your comment, Pat Scholfield. FYI -- I am beginning to hear of the other 'short stay' bed that are supposed to be funded. A CUPE local leader just emailed me an announcement from Liberal MPP Rick Bartolucci of funding for 9 beds at Sudbury Regional Hospital. My bet is that we will see more of this prior to the election. But if there is a majority government afterwards -- well hold on to your hat. -- Doug

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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. 

Paramedic Services in Canada: Structure, Privatization, Unionization and other issues

Governance and Funding :  While police and fire services are usually municipal services, Emergency Medical Services (EMS) are typically controlled by provincial governments.  In Ontario, regional municipal governments have responsibility for delivering and funding EMS.  But even in Ontario the province plays a key role, strictly regulating EMS, providing funding for 50% of the approved land ambulance costs, and paying 100% of the approved costs for air ambulance, dispatch, base hospitals, First Nation EMS, and for territories without municipal government. Delivery :  Like police and fire services, EMS is predominantly a publicly provided service in Canada.   But businesses have now made some significant in-roads into EMS, primarily  Medavie,  a private corporation based in the Maritimes that describes itself as not-for-profit.  Medavie goes back over 70 years, with its roots in health insurance.  It still operates Medavie Blue Cross with 1,900 employees.  It now a