Hospitals spent $31.9M on for-profit staffing agencies in Waterloo Region and Wellington County in one year

A hospital hallway is shown in this stock image. (Pexels)

After a study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives revealed hospitals in Ontario spent billions of dollars on for-profit staff, CTV News is getting a clearer picture of the cost in Waterloo Region and Wellington County.

The study was released on Monday and took a close look at the financial statements of the Canadian Institute for Health Information and 134 hospitals.

It said hospitals spent $9 billion over a 10-year period.

“What the report finds is that the government’s funding and policy decisions are responsible for a serious workforce crisis,” report author Andrew Longhurst said Wednesday in an interview with CTV News Kitchener.

According to the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), hospitals spent $31,901,556 on private agency staff in the Waterloo-Wellington region from 2022 to 2023.

Those workers included nurses, allied health professionals and other support staff.

“Perhaps the most troubling finding is that growth in public spending on private agencies has outpaced spending growth on hospital employed staff, and this is the case in Kitchener-Waterloo and the Waterloo-Wellington region,” Longhurst said.

When looking at longer-term trends in hiring from private agencies, Longhurst said one thing became clear.

“It was an increase in real per-capita spending over a 10-year period of 177 per cent, versus only a one per cent increase in real per-capita investment in employed hospital staff. There’s a mismatch. The hospitals in the Waterloo-Wellington region are increasing their spending much more quickly on agency staff on a real per-capita basis – so adjusted for inflation and adjusted for population – than they are on employed hospital staff. This is not to say that there are more agency staff overall than employed hospital staff, but that the rate of growth in public spending on those agency staff is increasing very rapidly.”

Longhurst was also quick to note that some hospitals feel they have no other option, as they are not receiving enough provincial funding to offer adequate wages to attract permanent staff members.

“Many hospitals are really trying to phase out the use of private for-profit staffing agencies, but they are between a rock and a hard place because they are dependent on the provincial government and the funding allocations to be able to increase compensation for permanent staff to be able to recruit and retain. If the provincial government wants to help hospitals out, what they would be doing is increasing funding to them and helping them phase out [for-profit workers] entirely.”