Defend Public Healthcare

Cascading health care cuts are resulting in significant problems for home care patients and their families, seriously undermining the main defense the government makes for its policy of hospital and long-term care cutbacks.  With hospital cutbacks and a virtual freeze on long-term care beds, home care and unpaid caregivers must now take care of sicker and sicker patients. This change in home care has been sudden and dramatic, as demonstrated in the graph below  from the the Ontario Association of Community Care Access Centres (the OACCAC represents the public sector organizations which manage home care for the government).   The OACCAC suggests  this shift means home care now replaces 150 long-term care homes, each with a capacity of 130 residents.  The OACCAC estimates cost pressures of about 5% per year to offset demographic changes and for the absorption of patients that would otherwise have been treated in hospitals or long-term care.  The O...

New hospital inpatient length of stay data published by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) indicates [1] Ontario lengths of stay continue to decline, but the pace of decline has picked up, and [2] the gap between the Ontario and Canadian average length of stay is growing and has now hit startling levels. Since 2007/8, Ontario inpatients have 0.6 fewer days in hospital. This is a decline in length of stay of 8.7%. The Canadian average declined only 0.1 day (1.3%). The Ontario decline corresponds with the real funding cuts for Ontario hospitals in recent years. Much of this occurred in the last year -- Ontario inpatients had 0.3 fewer days in 2014-15, a decline of 4.6%. The Canadian average is now 1.2 days longer – or, put another way, Canadian patients stay 19% longer. This corresponds with the extra funding Canadian hospitals get compared to Ontario hospitals.  The trend is even more apparent if we look at “age standardized average length of stay...

Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) hospital data indicates big changes in hospital activity, particularly in the most recent four years reported. Ontario, especially, is experimenting with hospital cuts and restructuring.   Hospital inpatient days are now dropping rapidly in Ontario – with a drop of 13.4% in inpatient days over the last four years. This has occurred even as inpatient days continue to increase in the rest of Canada (note: Quebec is excluded from the CIHI report as the data for that province is under review).  The data suggests a sharp fall in Ontario in 2013/14 compared to 2012/13 (8.9%), a less sharp decline over the previous 3 years, and significant growth over the previous five year period. Over the 15 years of data reported (1999/00 through 2013/14), Ontario inpatient days have increased 4.6%  -- even while population has increased at almost four times that rate (17.8 %) and the median age increased 4 full years (from 36.2 to 4...

Provincial government hospital expenditure per person in Ontario compared to the rest of Canada based on CIHI data. A large gap has grown between what the Ontario provincial government spends on hospitals and what other Canadian provinces spend.  Since 2004/5 the gap has grown from a mere $9.43 per person to $316.50 per person in 2012/13.  Nine years ago, the difference was 1%. Now, t he other provinces and territories  (as a whole)  spend  23% more per person on hospitals than Ontario does.    That is an astonishing difference.  Or at least the size of the difference is astonishing.   But that gap completely fits with the low level of nursing hours per inpatient in Ontario compared to the rest of Canada, the higher number of nursing sensitive "adverse events ", the low level of hospital beds in Ontario , the low level of hospital admissions in  Ontario , and the high level of hospital bed occupancy in Ontario. Ontario has...