Defend Public Healthcare

With the cuts to Ontario hosptials, high bed occupancy has become commonplace, forcing hospitals to cancel surgeries and introduce hallway medicine.  The Waterloo Record reports that Ontario hospitals have become aggressive about getting seniors out of hospital beds and raises questions about whether the actions of the hospital are even legal.  Some key facts reported by the Record : Many hospitals have developed policies encouraging patients to accept the first long-term care bed that becomes available, with hefty fees threatened for those who don't comply. Experts question whether high-pressure policies are ethical, or even legal.   Health Ministry managers, hospital officials and elder advocates who met in 2008 to examine first-available-bed policies concluded they "have no basis in legislation." Policies "often differ from hospital to hospital and are developed and applied in an inconsistent fashion across the province," the group said in a report o

The Waterloo Record has run a fascinating story today on waits for long term care in Ontario.  Some highlights: From 2007 to 2009, the average wait time for a nursing-home bed in Ontario more than doubled, from 49 to 109 days. The province wide tally of people waiting is now more than 25,000 and rising, doubled from 12,000 in 2005. The supply of new beds is static, with annual growth of less than one per cent. Only 900 more beds are expected to be available in nursing homes over the next 24 months. The average wait for a long-term care bed through the Local Health Integration Network of Waterloo Wellington is 204 days. Only 33.9 per cent get their first choice of home. For hard-to-place seniors with a need for a higher level of care, waits can be two or more times the provincial average. In rural areas and northern Ontario, families may be separated by hundreds of kilometres, if there are beds at all. On average, less than 40 per cent of applicants get their first-choice home.

The attack on community control of local hospitals continues.  This time in Northumberland, where the hospital board, which backed Liberal government cuts in local services, is using a new nomination process to prevent local hospital members from electing new hospital board members.  Instead the board has simply chosen five incumbent board members as the successful candidates! Former Coburg Mayor Angus Read finds it strange that members of the hospital board would be those deciding who should fill five board vacancies -- in essence "voting on themselves". The hospital board and its chief executive officer "want full control and they are leaving the people of Northumberland out of it," said local businessman Bill Patchett in an interview with Northumberland Today. Patchett, who helped with fundraising for the construction of the new hospital, adds "We're contemplating legal action." Here, as elsewhere, the new ideology is a 'skills-based board

The Vancouver Island Health Authority spent an additional $332,000 on cleaning staff in order to fight three outbreaks of Clostridium difficile in the past two years at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital. Hospital Employee Union communication officer Margi Blamey wants the health authority to invest in preventative measures, rather than spending so much money after an outbreak begins. "It's cheaper to prevent an outbreak than it is to contain it," she said. Since that initial outbreak that killed five people and infected nearly 100, the infection control team has instituted an immediate two-step cleaning of the entire hospital, a process not taken until the peak of the original outbreak. Infection control knows about increased infections sooner and they instantly call for more workers to do the full clean. "That speaks to the ongoing learning process that all of this has been for VIHA," said spokeswoman Suzanne Germain. The hiring of extra staff has not

The provincial government has emphasized the modest increases in 'global' hospital funding for the last few years: 2.4% in 2008/9, 2.1% in 2009/10, and 1.5% for 2010/11. But there is more to hospital funding than 'global' funding. The government just doesn't talk about it much. Global funding gives (some) control to local hospitals to determine local priorities.  But other funding?  Not so much Total funding increased about 3.5% in 2008/9 and 3% in 2009/10, giving the provincial govenrment some money to play with behind the scenes . The Ontario Hospital Association claims that this year the government's total hospital expense will increase 4.9% . Now that gives the government a lot of extra cash above and beyond the global increases. More than twice as much as the measly global funding increase of 1.5%. The question is, what is the government going to use this cash for?  Good or ill? At this point, one might ask -- why are hospital service cuts increa

Ontario was lucky the H1N1 pandemic was not worse, the province’s Chief Medical Officer of Health says in a report this week. Dr. Arlene King says had more people swarmed emergency departments for longer than they did “that might very well have tipped the system.” So it's good to know that since the pandemic, the province has stepped up cuts to our hospital services. (JK!).

The so-called 'hospital improvement plan' (HIP) is out for Peterborough Regional Health Centre. Or at least the slide show version of it.  Instead of adopting the proposals in the Peer Review, the HIP came up with a bunch of new plans. That's hardly surprising -- the point is not "hospital improvement", the point is to cut, cut, and cut again.  The HIP proposes $23.3M in cuts and $3.7M in increased revenues (including a $2.6M increase in funding from the government). This compares with $25.7M in cuts and $1 million in increased local revenues proposed in the Peer Review. The number of beds to be cut is now 'only' 20, with perhaps some more bed cuts to come later. Despite the decrease in dollar cuts proposed in the HIP, the number of full time equivalent positions (FTEs) to be eliminated has increased.  Instead of cutting 151.5 FTEs (as proposed by the Peer Review) they are now proposing to cut 171.9 FTEs – an increase 13.5%, or 20.4FTEs. That's q