Group items tagged

That was based on hospitals operating at 111 per cent of their usual capacity.

In May, Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office projected that the cancelled surgery backlog would reach 419,200 procedures by the end of September and estimated that it would cost the province $1.3 billion over three and a half years to clear the backlog.

Ontario Health CEO Matt Anderson said that there are around 200,000 people currently on provincially-tracked wait lists, but that number is similar to what would normally be expected. He said that’s because there are many people who have not yet entered the system through diagnosis and referral and said putting a number on the backlog group is “very difficult to do.”

Elliott said Wednesday that it is difficult to say how long it will take.

The province said it will “closely monitor” surgical outputs and wait times and will “implement additional measures if needed.”

Officials said Wednesday that virtually all of the backlog from Wave 1 has been cleared, while around 80-90 per cent of the Wave 2 backlog has cleared. However those estimates do not account for people who were either not diagnosed or who did not seek treatment because of the pandemic.

“I think it's difficult to put an exact timeline on it right now because there are some people that are going to become coming forward, they just haven't been diagnosed yet,” she said.

"You are correct in your understanding that the N95 masks purchased 13 years ago have expired," Ontario's health ministry said in a statement to Reuters.

Officials did not say how many masks remained in the stockpile.

Ontario, which includes Canada's largest city Toronto, said in 2007 it would buy 55 million N95 masks and other medical supplies to prepare for future epidemics. A report by the province's auditor general, completed in December 2017, found that more than 80 percent of that stockpile had expired.

Asked whether provincial officials have any masks on hand, the ministry did not answer directly. It said health organizations are getting their usual supply shipments, adding: "We are working with them and our supply chain partners to ensure they continue to have adequate access to supplies as they continue to effectively respond to COVID-19," the disease caused by the coronavirus.Ontario Nurses' Association president Vicki McKenna said in an email, "We believe that there is a supply problem but government officials will not confirm supply. ... This question is asked at every meeting with ministry officials."The spread of the coronavirus has triggered a global shortage of N95 respirator masks. The United States, for example, has said it has about 12 million, but needs roughly 300 million.

After a pilot project in Ottawa, the province is expanding the use of the Pfizer vaccine, which had previously been reserved for uses at hospitals. Now that it's been demonstrated that the Pfizer vaccine can be safely moved away from very-low-temperature freezers, the government will be using it more widely, including with mobile teams.

The groups have launched a petition asking the provincial government to halt the move for now.

Sioban Nelson, vice-provost and former dean of the University of Toronto’s faculty of nursing, said that while nurses’ scope of practice should evolve over time, this move would reduce training requirements.

“What it effectively does is it dissolves the distinction between bachelor degree-prepared nurses and two-year-prepared practical nurses,” she said.

Nelson said the development is a step backward in Canada’s efforts to move toward a degree-prepared nursing workforce. View link »

Home care officials say it is not surprising workers are opting to go elsewhere where they can earn between $6 to $15 more an hour. But the funding in home care has not kept up.

Home Care Ontario says additional funding is needed urgently to keep the crucial home care system running so hospitals can begin catching up on surgeries and people in need of care can get it.

The organization is asking for “an urgent $600-million investment in order to give patients the care they need,” according to Home Care Ontario.

Steve Perry, CEO of Carefor, a not-for-profit home care provider that is one of the largest in Eastern Ontario, said the company lost about 20-25 per cent of its staff during the pandemic for a variety of reasons. Moving elsewhere for better paying jobs was one of them.

If home care is not available, many patients cannot be discharged from hospital, which creates backlogs, she said. That issue is more urgent now as hospitals attempt to catch up on more than 450,000 surgeries that were delayed during the pandemic. Without more money into home care now, VanderBent said, some of those surgeries could be at risk.

Problems in home care existed before the pandemic, he said, but COVID-19 has exacerbated them.

“Where is the plan to help these people in the hospital to get home? It is just shocking lack of foresight in terms of system planning.”

She said the home care sector was stunned there was no additional pandemic money offered in Ontario’s budget.

During the pandemic, 3,000 home care nurses have taken other, better paid jobs in health care. Large numbers of PSWs have also left. At a time when everyone is struggling to recruit workers, she said it has reached crisis levels in home care. Where more than 90 per cent of people with complex medical conditions being discharged from hospital would previously be accepted for home care, that number has dropped to just 60 per cent, leaving a widening and costly gap. The average daily cost of acute care is $730, compared to about $95 to care for a patient at home.

At a time when there are fewer home care workers available, the need is greater, said Perry, as more people, with more complex needs, seek care at home.

“The province can’t continue to overlook home care,” said VanderBent.

Like so many others on the frontlines, Anita Quidangen is a true Ontario hero.

In this new phase, Ontario’s top doctor and public health officials are continuously monitoring hospitalizations and intensive care units, as these indicators drive decision making.

If additional public health measures are needed, they will be localized and targeted. At the advice of the Chief Medical Officer of Health, they will seek to minimize disruptions to businesses and families.

The ultimate goal, shared by all, is avoiding future lockdowns.

These historic investments will also bring a new hospital to Peel Region in Brampton, as your government addresses years of neglect by transforming Peel Memorial Centre from a day clinic into a state-of-the-art, 24-hour facility.

The pandemic has exposed the failure of successive governments, both provincial and federal, to provide adequate funding for our hospitals. The clear consequence was a health system ill-equipped to handle a crisis.

That is why your government has made unprecedented investments to add thousands of new hospital beds and ensure that qualified nurses and doctors are by a patient’s side when they need care.

As a result, Ontario now has one of the highest rates of intensive care beds in Canada. Ontario is now much better positioned to respond to this and any future health crisis.

This is in addition to historic investments to build and redevelop hospitals across the province, like the newly-constructed Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital, which initially operated as a province-wide resource to treat critically ill COVID-19 patients during the third wave of the pandemic and subsequently opened as a full-service hospital.

That is why Ontario has joined with every other province and territory in calling on the federal government to increase the Canada Health Transfer to 35 per cent of provincial-territorial health-care spending.

Your government will also continue to make progress in delivering a new hospital for the people of Windsor-Essex, who have long advocated for their voices to be heard and health needs to be met.

In support of this goal, your government continues to make investments to build up Ontario’s hospital capacity.

This pandemic also brought into sharp relief the long-standing vulnerabilities of the province’s long-term care sector. It uncovered unimaginable horrors, allowed because of decades of underfunding and neglect.

Your government is investing $2.68 billion to build 30,000 new and modern long-term care home beds in a decade, as thousands more are upgraded to 21st-century design standards.

In total, there are more than 20,000 new and 15,000 upgraded beds in development, representing more than 60 per cent of the province’s goal.

Between 2009 and 2019, the average total amount of care provided to residents increased by only 22 minutes from all providers. We must do more. Your government is doing more.

Ontario is investing nearly $5 billion over four years to hire more than 27,000 long-term care staff, including nurses and personal support workers. In doing so, Ontario will provide long-term care home residents with four hours of direct care per day.

By April 2022, Ontario will make significant progress by adding 16,200 more personal support workers to the health care system, including the province’s long-term care sector.

To fix the structural problems that have long plagued the sector, this fall your government will also introduce legislation to protect residents through better accountability, enforcement and transparency.

The days when bad actors could get away with anything less than quality care for our most vulnerable will be over.

A chronic lack of capacity was not isolated to the province’s hospitals.

The original promise of medicare included fifty-fifty funding between the federal government and the provinces and territories for critical health services. Since then, the federal government’s share has eroded, to the point where the Canada Health Transfer now only funds an average of 22 per cent of total provincial health-care costs.

This persistent gap represents billions of dollars in lost funding that Ontario could use to accelerate progress in delivering better care for our most vulnerable citizens. And addressing this gap represents an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate to Canadians that their governments are united.

Through no fault of their own, many Ontarians have fallen behind. Young adults, students and hospitality workers, among others, have been asked to shoulder so much of a pandemic that has demonstrated that too many workers live too precariously. At the same time, take home pay for many workers has not kept up with rising costs.

In particular, as our frontline health care heroes have cared for us, they have done so at great expense to their mental and physical wellbeing. Ontario’s efforts to rebuild a health system stretched to its limits and repair the province’s long-term care sector will respect the unique challenges faced by our doctors, nurses and personal support workers, as well as the countless other frontline heroes.

Significant fiscal challenges also loom on the horizon.