Nearly 70,000 patients injured in hospitals each year, says Ontario auditor

TORONTO — Nearly 70,000 patients are injured while receiving care in Ontario’s hospitals each year, the province’s auditor general said Wednesday, calling for immediate government action to help reduce that number.

In her 2019 annual report, Bonnie Lysyk said her team’s audits of acute-care centres found that six in every 100 patients treated and discharged from provincial hospitals were harmed during care.

“Each year, Ontario hospitals discharge one million people,” Lysyk said. “Of those, about 67,000 people were harmed during their hospital stay.”

The audit found that hospitals are currently not required to report to the Ministry of Health so-called “never-events” — a medical error that should never happen, such as leaving a foreign object inside a patient.

Lysyk said her team visited six of the 13 hospitals that track “never-events,” and found that 214 such incidents had occurred since 2015.

Ontario’s rates of patient harm are the second-highest in the country, after Nova Scotia.

Health Minister Christine Elliott said many hospitals in the province are beginning to report “near-events” to the government.

“This reporting ... is very important so that lessons can be learned and improvement can happen,” she said. “We will continue to work to ensure that all hospitals do report these critical incidents.”

The report found hospitals didn’t always comply with required safety practices standards, and nurses who had been repeatedly fired for incompetence were often rehired by other hospitals.

Lysyk also found that disciplining doctors can take years and impact a hospital’s budget. The report said a physician’s legal costs in matters of discipline are effectively paid for by the taxpayer because the government reimburses doctors for their malpractice insurance fees.

The report also probed food and nutrition in long-term care homes and found that they do not always meet quality standards. They often include too much sugar and salt, and not enough fibre.

Residents in three of five homes that the auditor’s team inspected were served food that was past its best-before date — one of the homes served liquid whole eggs three months past their best-before date.

The auditor’s team also looked at addictions services and found that wait times for treatment, opioid-related emergency department visits and death rates all continue to rise despite increased government funding. The province does not have adequate policies and procedures in place to deliver timely addictions services, monitor service providers or measure and report on their effectiveness, the report said.