Report claims there’s a hospital funding crisis across Ontario

Highlights of the report, called ‘Failure, By Design: Ontario’s Deepening Hospital Funding Crisis,’ were presented in Sudbury Wednesday as part of a tour across the province. (Lyndsay Aelick/CTV News)

A new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) concludes there is a hospital funding crisis in Ontario, including in Greater Sudbury.

Highlights of the report, called ‘Failure, By Design: Ontario’s Deepening Hospital Funding Crisis,’ were presented in Sudbury Wednesday as part of a tour across the province.

“These services that hospitals provide are fundamental to the well-being of communities,” said author Andrew Longhurst.

“They are so necessary when people need health care. And so the fact that we’re seeing, really, an unprecedented funding crisis playing out in the Province of Ontario, I think, deserves a public discussion.”

Most hospitals ran a deficit

In the North East region, Longhurst said 63 per cent of hospitals were in a deficit in the last fiscal year.

“We’ve heard that upwards of 70 per cent of hospitals provincially in the fiscal year ending in March are going to be in a deficit position,” he said.

“So we’re seeing a compounding of these deficits and the provincial underfunding when we see a gap of what the costs are in hospitals … rising six per cent each year versus what the provincial government is funding them at, which is up to four cent.”

In response to a request from CTV News, the Ministry of Health said claims made in the CCPA report are misguided.

“Ontario has one of the largest publicly funded health-care systems in the world, and our government is investing over $101 billion this year alone, including a four per cent increase in the hospital sector for the fourth consecutive year to connect people to the care they need when they need it,” said spokesperson Lily Barnes.

HSN wait times increase 169%

The CCPA report said that in the last five years, 90 per cent of patients at the ER at Health Sciences North in Sudbury saw their wait time for initial assessment in go from 2.7 hours to seven hours.

“That’s a 169 per cent increase,” Longhurst said.

“This is a shocking number … This is not to say that frontline health care workers and HSN aren’t doing their very best. But they are working with constraints.”

In response, the Ministry of Health said HSN funding has increased by 44 per cent since 2018, while the province is “investing $5 million to support the planning for future expansion, over $10 million to build a new 52-bed acute and reactivation care centre, which is already helping patients transition home,” among several other investments.

But Longhurst said an immediate increase in funding is needed, along with developing a provincial health care workforce strategy.

“We need to see funding of $3.2 billion, spread across Ontario’s hospital system, to stabilize hospital finances,” he said.

“We need to see a health workforce strategy that ensures that the provincial government can help support recruitment and retention and that we have the workforce in place.”

Sharon Richer, secretary-treasurer of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, said the report highlights issues that they have been talking about for years.

Richer said the union represents 46,000 hospital workers across Ontario.

“Our well-trained staff are going to the staff in (private) agencies because they can earn more money,” she said.

“This is a problem certainly across northern Ontario. And the other problem that we’ve seen just recently in North Bay -- huge staffing cuts ... Those are the cuts that we see when people actually leave their job. The job is being posted. Nobody’s applying for these positions because everybody knows the workload issues, certainly, within hospitals. So they’re just quietly being eliminated.”

To read the full report, click here.