Province to add 2,000 beds to ease health-care crunch
With winter flu season looming, region gets 160 temporary spaces
Ontario is opening 2,000 more hospital and health-care beds this year to help deal with overcrowding and lengthening wait lists, Health Minister Eric Hoskins said Monday, though it doesn’t yet know where an awful lot of them will be.
In many health regions, including Ottawa’s, “additional beds/ spaces” in places yet to be determined is the biggest category on the list Hoskins released. Those “beds” for which there’s money but nowhere yet to spend it make up a quarter of the 2,000 spaces across the province and 58 of the 160 allocated to the Champlain region, which covers Ottawa.
Also, the beds are temporary, just to get hospitals through the winter influenza season. They’re slammed every day now and the flu’s barely starting (public flu clinics start this weekend). Last week Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario begged parents to reconsider visiting its emergency room for non-emergencies.
“The ministry will work closely with (regional health authorities) to evaluate the usage and outcomes related to these additional hospital beds and community spaces to develop a plan for 2018-19 and beyond,” said Laura Gallant, a spokeswoman for Hoskins. It’ll be a budget decision that has to be made with the finance ministry and the province’s treasury board.
The Ottawa Hospital is getting money for 45 beds, on top of the 916 it has in its Civic and General campuses. It reports daily on its capacity and at mid-day Monday it had 54 more in-patients than official beds for them, plus 42 people in its emergency rooms waiting to be admitted. This has been a crisis all year.
Of The Ottawa Hospital’s in-patients, 151 were waiting for suitable care elsewhere on Monday. So 20 “transitional care spaces” at the Perley Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre are being funded, along with 12 supportive-housing beds in the Elisabeth Bruyère Hospital.
Many of these projects have been in the works for months, driven not by the province but by the institutions themselves.
The government’s doing things like this all over, in an attempt to open beds in hospitals for people who really need high-level medical care but can’t get it because the beds are occupied by patients who would be OK with less attention if only there were somewhere for them to go and get it.
The biggest instance is in Toronto, where the Health Ministry is reopening 150 beds in a hospital building that recently closed for patients who need medical care but not the full panoply of hospital services. Another former physical rehabilitation centre there is reopening with 75 beds.
(These “alternate level of care” patients, trapped consuming resources they don’t need or want, have been a problem provincial governments have failed to solve for decades. It can be done. It’s just really expensive, requiring more advanced nursing home spaces and a ton more home-based health care.)
Allocating the hundreds of beds that haven’t been assigned to particular hospitals yet will have to be done quickly.
“We are continuing to work with hospitals and LHINs on remaining proposals and will be allocate as communities finish this work. This work will continue to unfold in the coming weeks,” Gallant said.
Hoskins’s appearance at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto coincides with the beginning of the northern hemisphere’s flu season. Respiratory illnesses slam emergency rooms with coughing, drippy patients every year. Some just need to go home and rest till they get better; others, especially young children and the elderly, need to be admitted
and monitored and helped till their immune systems knock the viruses out.
Australia has already had its annual bout with influenza and it was particularly nasty, which is often a sign that the same will happen here. According to the latest stats from Public Health Ontario, the City of Ottawa is one of two jurisdictions in the province (along with Peel Region, west of Toronto) with marked outbreaks of flu so far, though it’s not yet widespread. The season usually peaks just after Christmas.
Anthony Dale, the head of the Ontario Hospital Association, said his members are pleased with the “surge plan,” which he said “will improve the health system’s ability to serve patients this coming winter, especially during flu season.”
Unless the province finds more money in the spring, though, the post-surge plan is that we’ll be back to where we are today, with hospitals that are just normally overburdened, unable to handle normal demands for their services.