Ontario hopes to ease healthcare pressures by increasing publicly covered surgeries at private clinics, waiving exams and registration fees for internationally trained nurses and sending patients waiting for a long-term care bed to a home they didn’t choose .
On Thursday, Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced a plan to hire more health professionals, free up hospital beds and reduce surgical waiting lists. The plan comes as a shortage of nursing staff has caused emergency departments across the province to close over the summer for hours or days at a time.
On long-term care, the government plans to introduce legislation today that will allow patients waiting for a bed to be moved to a “temporary” home while they wait for space in their preferred home. It is also taking 300 beds that had been used for COVID-19 isolation and making them available to people on waiting lists, and says there is the potential to do this with 1,000 more beds in six months.
The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care confirmed to CBC Toronto that 200 people who have been in hospital for six months waiting for LTC beds will be moved over the next three months, with a total of 1,300 moved by March 2023.
LOOK | Ontario’s health minister outlines a 5-point plan to improve care:
Ontario’s health minister outlines 5-point plan to improve care
Health Minister Sylvia Jones says Ontario’s new plan to improve health care will add workers, improve innovation and expand the number of available hospital beds.
However, Long-Term Care Minister Paul Calandra said the legislation would not force anyone who does not want to leave hospital to leave, nor would it make “any changes to the priority waiting list”.
“The changes allow us to continue that conversation to explain to someone in a hospital why their needs can be met in a long-term care home,” Calandra said.
The province’s plan also mentions “mandatory guidelines used by placement coordinators to ensure patients remain close to a partner, spouse, loved ones or friends.”
Critics say the changes won’t fix the main problem
But NDP health critic France Gélinas said the province would be better off bolstering the home care system with more full-time personal support workers.
“Now, hospitals will have the right to put a lot of pressure on you and your family to move you to the first available bed, not the bed of your choice,” he said.
“This is disrespectful, this is not how health care should be.”
Gélinas suggested that the first available beds would likely be “in a private for-profit home”, some of which were the subject of a scathing military report in 2020 after experiencing some of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19 in the province.
In a statement, Lisa Levin, CEO of Advantage, an association of nonprofit senior care organizations, says they are concerned about closing isolation beds at this time. According to the province, there are 181 long-term care homes in active outbreaks of COVID-19 as of Aug. 13.
“We must ensure that sufficient safeguards are in place to protect these residents against COVID-19,” Levin said.
The province also announced plans to invest up to $57.6 million over three years to increase the number of nurse practitioners working in long-term care homes.
While the new investments bring significant resources and funding to the sector, Donna Duncan, CEO of the Long-Term Care Association of Ontario, says it’s not enough to address the day-to-day staffing challenges faced by faced by all households, and in particular those in rural and rural areas. remote communities.
“To support safe hospital admissions, we need to ensure our homes have the human and other health workforce resources, especially as we move into the anticipated fall flu/COVID season ,” Duncan wrote.
According to the Ontario Long Term Care Association, the homes facilitate more than 37,000 transitions from hospital to long-term care per year, ensuring adequate flow through 2,200 acute care beds. (CBC)
The association says it represents nearly 70 per cent of Ontario’s 630 long-term care homes, in a mix of private, not-for-profit, charitable and municipal settings. Duncan says the association faces an LTC waiting list of nearly 40,000 people, with seniors “needing quality care close to loved ones and their communities.”
“All healthcare sectors are facing serious labor shortages and we are all looking to hire from the same pool of available healthcare professionals,” Duncan said.
Greater prominence of private services
The province’s plan outlines more of a role for private but publicly covered services, and the government says it will invest more to increase surgeries at pediatric hospitals and existing private clinics covered by OHIP. It is also considering options to further increase surgical capacity by increasing the number of these procedures performed in “independent health facilities”.
Jones said Ontario needs to be “bold, innovative and creative” in looking for ways to improve the health care system.
“There are some who will fight for the status quo no matter what,” he said at a news conference announcing the plan. “They are ideologically opposed to change or improvement. We will not accept it. We cannot accept it. People want better health care.”
Jones did not directly respond to a question about whether he would consider allowing more private clinics in Ontario.
“Health care will continue to be delivered to the people of Ontario through the use of your OHIP card,” he said.
Nurses association opposes further privatisation
Cathryn Hoy, president of the Ontario Nurses Association, criticized the plan to increase services at private clinics.
“This is a blatant move that will line the pockets of investors, nothing more,” he said in a statement.
“The evidence is clear: privatizing health care provides worse health outcomes for our patients and has much higher overall costs that will be paid by taxpayers. Ontario is moving deeper into privatization that will only benefit shareholders.”
LOOK | The president of the OMA, Dra. Rose Zacharias, comments on the provincial health plan:
Ontario outlines 5-point plan to ease healthcare pressures
Dr. Rose Zacharias, president of the Ontario Medical Association, joins The Rundown to discuss Ontario’s 5-point plan that aims to ease the strain on the province’s health care system.
Hoy called it “puzzling” that the plan also outlines steps to support emergency department doctors, but not nurses.
“The government missed a huge opportunity here to strengthen nurse compensation as a key to retention and recruitment to stem additional closings,” she said.
Ontario is expanding and introducing a number of programs aimed at strengthening hospital staffing in northern and rural communities, such as having ER physicians support and train those in rural ERs and linking resident physicians with those of the northern and rural ERs.
In a statement, liberal health critic Dr Adil Shamji called the plan “a series of empty promises” that showed the government had “learned no lessons from the pandemic”.
“Instead of shirking their responsibility to strengthen our publicly funded health system by asking the for-profit sector to fix the problems,” the health minister said, “he must come up with real solutions that address the root causes fundamental to the extreme pressure our healthcare system is under.” .”
Viable solutions include creating “a strong nursing workforce by repealing Bill 124,” Shamji said, along with increased funding for primary and community care operations that would reduce visits to emergencies Until then, he said, “this crisis will continue to spiral out of control.”
Ontario to cover the expenses of some nurses
In the meantime, the province will temporarily cover examination, application and registration fees for retired and internationally trained nurses, saving them up to $1,500.
Jones said he expects a plan today from both the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario and the College of Nurses of Ontario on how they intend to expedite applications for those professionals still waiting to be accredited and licensed in Ontario.
The nursing college plan involves temporarily enrolling thousands of internationally trained nurses.
The province’s plan also includes modifying a program that can deploy full-time nurses to multiple hospitals in a region and expanding a program for mid- to late-career or retired nurses to mentor newer nurses.
“There are a lot of pieces that are part of this plan that are not done,” Jones told reporters.