By Joel Wittnebel/Active Senior’s Digest
It has been a cold and flu season like no other, and one that has seen hospitals across the province bursting at the seams and straining to care for an overwhelming number of sick Ontarians.
December saw reports filtering in from Brantford, Oshawa, Quinte, Hamilton, Sudbury and many more, of hospitals that were “overwhelmed” and facing an “extraordinary” number of patients, much more than the seasonal flu surge generally creates.
For Lakeridge Health, the operator of four hospitals in Oshawa, Ajax-Pickering, Bowmanville and Port Perry, the issue got so bad that the organization issued a press release stating they were setting up a “command centre” and a special team of staff to try and get a handle on the issue.
“We’re experiencing volumes over and above our usual holiday numbers,” states Lakeridge Health President and CEO Matthew Anderson in a news release. “Our health care teams are doing superhuman work to deal with this province-wide surge.”
The hospital was able to disband the additional team as numbers slowly started to ease back to normal.
However, the Ontario Health Coalition lashed out at the province claiming that the issue stretches much further back than simply a shortage of beds in 2016, saying they were “disturbed” by these reports, calling the issue a “systemic shortage” of hospital beds resulting from years of hospital cuts.
“The fact is that Ontario has the fewest hospital beds left per patient of anywhere in Canada, and Canada itself is near the bottom of the entire OECD list of countries,” says Natale Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition in a news release. The Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) works with government to try and push policies to improve the lives of people around the world through policy. “The bottom line is that no other jurisdiction plans to run its hospital system perpetually skirting the edge of crisis like Ontario does. There is not enough hospital bed capacity left in Ontario to deal with normal patient volumes let alone the annual holiday and winter virus season surge, and patients and front-line staff are paying the price.”
However, the Ontario government, in a response to inquiries from Active Senior’s Digest, pointed out that funding for health care in the province was actually increased in 2016 by $1 billion. The increase brings Ontario’s annual spending on healthcare to $51.8 billion.
“As a result of the work we’ve done and the investments we’ve made, Ontario’s health-care system is treating more patients, providing better care and reducing wait times to some of the shortest in the country,” says David Jensen, a spokesperson with the ministry of health and long-term care.
Jensen also notes that the province is investing $3 billion into 35 major hospital projects that are either under construction or being planned across the province as well as providing additional funding for home and community care ($270 million), community-based hospice ($75 million) and community health centres ($85 million), along with providing more funding for hospitals that are experiencing a growth in patient volume.
“We are committed to continuing to work with our partners across the sector to improve access and quality of care for all. Together we’re building a better health-care system that will meet the needs of Ontario families for generations to come.”
