Protest last month over plans to contract hospital services to private clinics. Competitions have not been announced, but hospitals are cutting diagnostic and lab jobs, suggesting the government may be trying to achieve the same aim by stealth.
In October a Whitby nursing home experienced a major fire displacing more than 250 residents.
About 80 of those residents found temporary accommodation in area hospitals. Many are still there for lack of available alternative long term care spaces in the community. It’s remarkable the public hospitals were able to accommodate this many residents given the limited availability of beds.
Hospitals are presently in the third year of a base funding freeze. The Ontario government has maintained that the freeze is part of their overall health care transformation plan, but the Whitby experience would suggest that there is increasingly less flexibility due to funding shortfalls across the entire system. In another year or two how many beds will be available under a similar emergency?
The previous Auditor General of Ontario warned in 2011 that restraining annual health care funding increases to a proposed 3.6 per cent would lead to either service cuts or rising deficits. Instead we have seen health care funding increases limited even further to roughly 2 per cent.
In recent weeks a number of hospitals have been meeting with their respective unions to give notice of layoffs in the coming year. This is starting to become an annual holiday season tradition worthy of a Charles Dickens novel.
OPSEU Diablogue 