CUPE officials are advocating for the province to bolster hospital funding as service cuts loom<\/p>\n
Amid a province wide funding crunch over the next few years, Sault Area Hospital could lose beds and dozens of health-care workers.<\/p>\n
After steadily rising between 2021 and 2024, hospital funding for the 2025-26 fiscal year is projected to drop $500 million below the $91.6 billion shelled out by the province last year \u2014 with impacts already being felt far and wide.<\/p>\n
According to a new report, hospitals around Ontario have been driven to the brink, and flat funding over the next three years promises little help.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had a nurse tell me that she was thinking of quitting. She\u2019d had a horrible day,\u201d said Michael Hurley, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe said, \u2018I should have four palliative care patients, and I had eight people who were sick,\u2019 and then she described to me how these are people who are dying and so they have complex emotional needs and spiritual needs, which she can\u2019t fulfill.\u201d<\/p>\n
The CUPE and OCHU report, Driven to the Brink: Projected Cuts to Intensify Hospital Crisis, lays out a concerning picture of the next few years should the provincial government stay its current course, both in Sault Ste. Marie and around the province.<\/p>\n
Between 2025-26 and 2027-28, Sault Area Hospital could effectively lose up to 17 hospital beds, and the city could lose 63 publicly funded nurse and personal support worker positions, officials say.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we have found is that rural, small and northern hospitals are the hardest hit,\u201d said Doug Allan, senior researcher with CUPE.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the last few years, there was a big explosion in terms of hospitals closing \u2014 sometimes just for a night or a couple of days, sometimes more permanently \u2014 but that has happened almost exclusively at small, rural and northern hospitals.\u201d<\/p>\n
With this year\u2019s funding cut \u2014 and relatively modest bumps of $1.3 billion and $1.2 billion in 2026-27 and 2027-28 \u2014 the situation doesn\u2019t look any better elsewhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat will mean the closure of about 2,400 hospital beds, the loss of 7,500 nursing positions and about 1,800 personal support worker positions, and in fact, we\u2019re already seeing these job eliminations and layoffs across the province,\u201d Hurley said.<\/p>\n
It will also mean continued \u201challway\u201d health care, where overburdened hospitals are forced to treat patients in unconventional spaces like hallways, closets, cafeterias and even bathrooms.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a measure the Ford government once vowed it would end, but has recently decided to stop disclosing figures for instead.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s about 2,000 people waiting for beds on stretchers on any given day, so many that the government\u2019s just announced they\u2019re not going to report that item anymore to the public \u2026 which is one way of dealing with the problem,\u201d Hurley said.<\/p>\n
With months still remaining before the province\u2019s budget, as well as the end of the current fiscal year, officials hope additional funding will be announced to bolster health care in places like the Sault and beyond.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe budget is coming up, but we don\u2019t have to wait to the budget,\u201d Allan said. \u201cWe still have this fiscal year, and this fiscal year needs a funding bump.\u201d<\/p>\n
To get hospitals up to proper staffing levels, add needed beds and clear backlogs for surgeries \u2014 there are 75,000 of those \u2014 around $3.2 billion in additional funding is needed, Hurley said, adding that the annual increase in funding should be closer to six per cent than two per cent.<\/p>\n
About 1,777 additional beds are needed to get the province back up to 2015 service levels, and more than 48,000 staff are needed to get Ontario to the equivalent level of staffing patients have in other Canadian provinces.<\/p>\n
\u201cCanada is an outlier compared to the rest of the developed nations, but on staffing, Ontario is a particular outlier in Canada,\u201d Allan said.<\/p>\n
To meet demand, Allan said the province will need a 4.6-per-cent increase in capacity, but \u201cthe actual funded reality is for seven per cent fewer beds\u201d \u2014 an 11.6-per-cent discrepancy.<\/p>\n
Moving forward, Allan and Hurley said they have 15 rallies planned in communities around the province in the coming weeks \u2014 including one slated for North Bay next week.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re hoping, we\u2019re pushing,\u201d Hurley said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess the question we\u2019re asking Mr. Ford is that surely a wealthy province like this, in a wealthy country like this, can afford to have a higher quality of care for its people than we\u2019re currently providing in our hospitals.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CUPE officials are advocating for the province to bolster hospital funding as service cuts loom Amid a province…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":["post-465021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}