Group says hospitals are underfunded
One of the six operating rooms at Cambridge Memorial Hospital is being used for storage because of a lack of provincial funding.
That was one example of how the hospital system is being bled dry and is constrained from operating even at its current capacity, said the Waterloo Region Health Coalition, at a news conference Wednesday in Waterloo.
Unused and underused operating space affects wait-lists for procedures, said Dr. Michael Lawrie, the retired chief of staff of Cambridge Memorial Hospital, at the event.
“Hospitals are limited by their funding as to how many hours of operating room time they can provide,” Lawrie explained, noting that operating rooms often sit idle in the evenings. “The capacity is there, but funding and human resources are a problem.”
A total of five operating rooms in the region are regularly not in use, said Jim Stewart, chair of the local coalition.
“Our public hospitals are on their knees,” Stewart said, noting that the province has spent less than it planned on health care for the past several years, often more than $1 billion less than budgeted, according to the provincial Financial Accountability Office.
That underfunding of health care is happening at the same time the provincial government is increasing the number of private clinics and procedures it funds, the group said.
Funding for private hospitals has more than tripled in the past five years, while public hospitals got an operating funding increase of half a per cent, the group said.
“We could easily take care of our waitlists and our backlogs in surgeries by simply funding in our already bought-and-paid-for operating rooms,” Stewart said.
Creating a parallel private system doesn’t save money, he said. Instead, Stewart said, it destabilizes an already underfunded health-care system, and siphons already limited skilled health professionals from the public system to the private system.
Waterloo Region has 140 vacancies for registered nurses that aren’t being filled because of a lack of funding, Stewart said.
The time is ripe to send a strong message to Queen’s Park, that investments need to happen in the public system, the group said.
“I think there’s a battle call to say: There are fundamental problems as the health-care system is being strangled and whittled away and services transferred to the private system,” Lawrie said.
The province rejects those criticisms. The provincial government has increased funding to the hospital sector by four per cent this year, added 17,000 nurses and 2,400 physicians and returning the surgical backlog to pre-pandemic levels, said Hannah Jensen, a spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones.
“While the Ontario Health Coalition continues to be ideologically opposed to any action our government is taking to build a more connected health-care system, we will continue our work that is providing you with better access to care, closer to home.”
The health coalition is urging an indepth investigation into who’s benefiting from the increase in funding for private clinics.
It would also like to see a centralized wait-list so that people could be prioritized by need, rather than the current system of “dozens and dozens” of waitlists controlled by different physicians across the province.