Patients are put through hell in hospital hallways. It must stop
Hallway health care. It’s one of those phrases that sounds almost innocuous until you realize about 1,000 sick or injured people a day in Ontario are laying on gurneys lining busy hospital hallways, or even in showers, waiting for an actual room. Sometimes for days.
It’s a nightmare for patients needing a little privacy as well as peace and quiet, maybe even some sleep, none of which is to be had in a busy hospital corridor. Dignity? Gone the minute the patient finally gets to discuss their very personal issues with a health-care provider standing beside their stretcher in a hallway.
We should all be angry, because this shameful situation is going to get worse, before it gets only marginally better.
The problem of people no longer in need of hospital-level care taking up very expensive hospital beds because there is nowhere else for them to go has been growing for years, but Ontario’s pace of adding new long term care beds and expanding home-care services has been pathetic. A provincewide shortage of personal support workers amid an increasing demand for their services has stranded people in hospitals who could be at home with a few hours of assistance a day.
It’s as if no one realized it’s far more cost effective, not to mention way more beneficial to people’s health, to help them spend as little time in hospitals as humanly possible. It costs four times as much to care for someone in a hospital than in a long-term care home.
The Financial Accountability Office reports 35,000 Ontarians are on a wait list for long-term care, up 78 per cent since 2012. An aging and growing population contributed to the problem, but such a huge increase is clearly a result of poor planning. Health Quality Ontario estimates there are more than 4,000 people waiting in hospitals for more appropriate placement in long-term care, rehabilitation, assisted living or home-care. They wait an average of 146 days to get into LTC, but that can vary greatly depending where they live.
Even with 15,000 new LTC beds promised by the Progressive Conservative government, the wait list will grow to 40,000 next year and only come down to current levels by 2023. The FAO says half of the 15,000 beds have been allocated, but the NDP say only 21beds have been created since the PCs took office. Another 55,000 new beds will be needed by 2033 just to keep the wait list at 37,000.
Premier Doug Ford proclaimed hallway health care would be a thing of the past by next summer, but critics accused him of magical thinking. The New Democrats say documents accessed under freedom of information show the PCs have been re-announcing longterm care beds already announced but not built by the Liberals. That’s not helping.
The Tories inherited this mess, but it’s theirs now, and building more capacity in long-term care and home-care is extremely expensive. Ford must decide if he can stick to his goal of balancing the budget by 2023 while also meeting ever increasing demands in health care, which already eats up over 40 per cent of all program spending. His government increased health-care spending this year to $63.5 billion, and the sector has a 4.5 per cent annual inflation rate.
There’s already been blowback on Ford’s plan to cut public health funding to municipalities. People will be watching closely to ensure his pledge to stop parking patients in hospital hallways doesn’t get sacrificed on the altar of deficit elimination or lost in his government’s overhaul of the entire healthcare system. Patients, many elderly, are being put through hell in hospital hallways. It must stop.