Skip to main content

Will new legislation increase role of non-emergency patient transfers?

Yesterday, the Liberal government proposed to regulate non-emergency patient transfers via legislation. However, as the legislature has stopped sitting and will not sit until after the fall election, the proposal  may be moot. 

In recent years, patient transfers have been moved from Emergency Medical Services (EMS) to patient transfer operations.  While EMS is largely provided by not-for-profit public organizations, patient transfer operations are often run by for-profit businesses.  These businesses generally make their trucks looks like ambulances and the public often thinks they are ambulances.  There is little if any regulation of these businesses, and that sparked an unfavorable report from CBC radio on the sub-sector as well as comment from the Ombudsman. 

The government is only promising to set 'core standards' for non-emergency patient transfers between health care facilities, so even if passed, it sounds like the government is limiting expectations regarding how much regulation will be placed on this sub-sector. It is, however, possible that legislation could increase the roles that non-emergency patient transfer organizations play.  

The government is promising consultations, but there is no word yet on when that might occur.  

With the growing regionalization of health care services, patients transfers between health care facilities is a growing business, and is likely to continue to grow.  The government estimates there are currently between 400,000 and 500,000 non-emergency patient transfers per year.

For the full release from the government click here.  


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more