Defend Public Healthcare

Ontario hospitals are funded by the Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) through "accountability agreements". Last December 16, a joint steering committee of the LHINs and the Ontario Hospital Association met to discuss the process for 2012 and agreed "that the economic environment continues to remain challenging and that multi-year funding targets will likely not be provided." Accordingly, they aimed for a one year extension of the existing agreements (which started way back in 2008). Hospital Annual Planning Submissions  ("HAPS" -- the secretive documents that hospitals submit to the LHINs before the accountability agreements are finalized) were to be distributed to the hospitals in January, as were hospital funding   targets .  The plan was to have the accountability agreements in place when the existing agreements expired on March 31, 2012. This was not to be. Since then, the government announced new funding models for the hospitals.  This

All hospitals in the province now have individual Quality Improvement Plans (QIPs) that set out indicators for quality improvement.  Each hospital ranks the indicator by priority ('1' for most important for that hospital, '2' for medium, and '3' for least important). The government has recommended a  core set  indicators that fall into five categories: safety, effectiveness, access, 'patient centred', and 'integrated' (a word they use for some reason to cover the 30 day readmission rate and percentage of ALC days). The first year for the hospital QIPs was 2011-12. Annual QIP’s must be available to the public via the hospital's web site by April 1. For one example, click this link for the Lakeridge Health "Short Form" QIP . Health Quality Ontario (a government body) is supposed to to analyze the plans and identify gaps, opportunities, and "learnings" (by which I think they mean " lessons "). In a numbers in

In a media release yesterday, the government re-announced 3 million hours in personal support services for home care (among other re-announcements and one bona-fide announcement).  The hours were  also re-announced  ten days ago in another media release as well as way back in January, in the government's " Action Plan for Health Care " and the  Health Minister's speech  on the Action Plan (to the corporate crowd at the Toronto Board of Trade). At that time of the Action Plan, I made some rather unkind remarks  about the smallness of this particular contribution in light of what it was supposed to achieve.   But as it turns out, I was not unkind enough.  The government did not indicate in the Health Care Action Plan that the promise was to fund 3 million hours " over the next three years " .   Naive me -- I thought they meant to do it in a year! The two re-announcements in May, however did let us in on this fact. So I guess re-announcements do

Home care is not covered by the Canada Health Act and so there is no guarantee that medically necessary services be covered by public insurance.  This lack has long been one of the concerns raised by advocates of public health care, especially as home care plays a bigger role in health care.  Conference Board of Canada figures (released with a study yesterday) heighten this concern, at least for Ontario, where the role of private payment is increasing. Conference Board estimates indicate that the increase in public funding for home care in Ontario (in nominal dollars) was between 62% and 65% over the 11 years from 1999 to 2010.  Over the same period, private payment for health care increased 88%.  That is over one-third faster.   Canada-wide the story is a little different.  There, home care spending increased much more rapidly, both in the public and private spheres, with increases -- in both spheres -- in the 100% range.   Ontario lost a lot of ground in publicly funded