Home care agency seeks $4.7 M to reduce deficit

The head of the Erie St. Clair Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) is seeking $4.68 million in new funding to help her agency deal with an $8 to $10 million deficit, the Sarnia Observer reports.

CUPE Local 4370 president Brian Biggers told the Observer that worker hours have been reduced.

"It's having a sort of revolving door effect on staff," he said. "Because staff have to move on to other things. They have to survive."

The CCAC has asked the Chatham Kent hospital to limit its referrals to the CCAC because of the CCAC's budget deficit.

The Ministry of Health and LTC claims that improvements in home care will offset the budget squeeze on hospital services. However, the Observer reports a doubling of in-patients at the local Sarnia hospital waiting for less intensive forms of health care. Meanwhile the Chatham-Kent hospital is planning to cut over 20 beds.

The government agency responsible for funding the CCAC was unavailable for comment to the Oberver. In the past, the Minister of Health has suggested more money was coming for home care.

We are now more than 4 and a half months into the fiscal year.

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...

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...

The long series of failures of private clinics in Ontario

For many years, OCHU/CUPE has been concerned the Ontario government would transfer public hospital surgeries, procedures and diagnostic tests to private clinics. CUPE began campaigning in earnest against this possibility in the spring of 2007 with a tour of the province by former British Health Secretary, Frank Dobson, who talked about the disastrous British experience with private surgical clinics. The door opened years ago with the introduction of fee-for-service hospital funding (sometimes called Quality Based Funding). Then in the fall of 2013 the government announced regulatory changes to facilitate this privatization. The government announced Request for Proposals for the summer of 2014 to expand the role of "Independent Health Facilities" (IHFs). With mass campaigns to stop the private clinic expansion by the Ontario Health Coalition the process slowed. But it seems the provincial Liberal government continues to push the idea. Following a recent second...

Defend Public Healthcare

Search This Blog