Hallway Medicine: It Can Be Fixed
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- Published on Thursday, 22 November 2018 23:10
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1708 ... November 23, 2018
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Hallway Medicine: It Can Be Fixed
Doug Allan and Michael Hurley
This brief is part of a cross province campaign begun before the summer election by the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions / CUPE to alert the public to the dangers to hospital and healthcare posed by a Doug Ford Progressive Conservative government. After the election, TD released a report suggesting the government to make even deeper cuts to real program spending -- $23.9-billion annually by 2022/23. CUPE, along with other unions, is working closely with the Ontario Health Coalition (OHC) and the hundreds of community groups affiliated to it. The OHC Assembly in November debated a new Action Plan, which calls on the community -- labour alliance to build a rally at Queen’s... Park in the spring that will double the size of the October 24 healthcare rally of 8,000 at the legislature.
Ontario faces unprecedented challenges of hospital underfunding and lack of capacity. For decades governments have pretended to try to address this problem through improved home care. Yet, today the result has been an overwhelmed home care system that has seen a staggering increase in the sickness of the patients it is trying to treat, and a hospital system reduced to treating over-capacity patients in hallways. Funding improvements are needed in all these sectors. The new government has promised to end hallway medicine, yet their fiscal plans threaten to make the situation worse.
Hospitals typically benchmark against each other to determine care levels and efficiency. But when Ontario hospitals are benchmarked against hospitals in other provinces, a pattern clearly emerges -- underfunding and under-capacity. Provincial hospital funding per-capita is 28.3% higher in the rest of Canada than in Ontario -- $404.09 more per person per year.
The gap between Ontario and the rest of Canada is a relatively new phenomenon. For decades we were in lock-step with the rest of Canada. We have fallen far behind since 2006.
