Ontario must act now on hospital care crisis

Remember the fable about the little boy who cried wolf once too often? Or the one about Henny Penny (the Americans say Chicken Little), who ran around crying “The sky is falling!”

It can feel like that writing about the state of Ontario’s hospital system, and hospitals in the Hamilton area, in particular. That subject has been covered in this space a half dozen or so times in the past three or four years. There have been ebbs and flows, a few high points when provincial investment in hospitals improves; and many low points when the opposite happens, and the inevitable cutbacks, overcrowding, lack of beds and bad outcomes for patients are the result.

And yet nothing, or at least not nearly enough, has changed. And now, here we sit, in the closing months of 2017, staring straight at a crisis. Read Joanna Frketich’s story on today’s front page to understand how serious it is. St. Joseph’s Healthcare had 26 per cent more patients than beds in August. That’s typically a relatively quiet month. In September, local hospitals ran an average of 86 overflow beds — meaning they’re not funded by the province. That doesn’t even include patients experiencing ER crowding. In September, an average of 51 patients daily were stuck in ERs waiting for a bed to open.

But wait, you might be thinking, didn’t the province just announce serious money for new hospital beds? Wasn’t there a long-term care bed expansion announcement recently? Yes and yes. Both developments are appreciated in the local health-care system. But the ugly truth is that these are a Band-Aid on an amputation. The new hospital beds, for example, don’t even cover the unfunded beds now in operation.

And here’s the really scary part. We aren’t even in the busiest time of the year — flu season. If it turns out to be a bad one, as is being predicted by some experts, we — patients, families, hospital staff, emergency workers — are in serious trouble. The fact that hospitals currently operate under crushing strain and still do a credible and valiant job of providing good patient care won’t be enough. Even dedicated professionals don’t have infinite capacity.

This is Ontario, not some have-not jurisdiction in Donald Trump’s suffering America. We must do better, and there’s no time to spare. The provincial government has to do more — a lot more. It has so far just nibbled at the edges of the problem. Invest now, and invest adequately.

We all know hospitals aren’t the problem, they’re a symptom. The problem is demographics, a critical long-term care shortage, inadequate resources for community-based care and, to a lesser extent, abuse of ERs by patients who should be dealt with in primary care. But this symptom can be deadly. And only the provincial government can treat it. Please, do so now.