Unless the North Bay Regional Health Centre hires 300 staff annually, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) says problems with spiking emergency room wait times and unprecedented staffing shortages will deepen as the population ages, based on available government and hospital data.
"So far, the provincial government has not shown the urgency or commitment to public health care required to develop a workforce retention plan to stabilize capacity in our public hospitals," says Dave Verch, a registered practical nurse and first vice-president of CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU-CUPE). "That would require the improvement of working conditions to stop the bleeding of staff. This includes increasing wages, full-time employment and lowering workloads. Then, the number of resignations would go down and hospitals would not have to recruit so many new staff to deal with the unprecedented turnover rates and increased needs of an ageing and growing population."
To keep hospital emergency rooms and other units from closing, overall, across Ontario, 46,000 more hospital staff must be hired just to deal with a 14.95 per cent hospital staff turnover rate and the high number of hospital job vacancies, the impacts of COVID and long COVID, and the increased needs of the population.
Across Ontario, the wait time to be seen in emergency departments has consistently spiked since Premier Doug Ford's Ontario PC government has been in power, with a 47 per cent increase in the last year alone, says CUPE. Equally concerning is that more than $1.6 billion in provincial COVID-19 money that helped hospitals deal with the additional costs of increased patient volumes and capacity pressure, is set to be eliminated in 2023.
Even with the special COVID-19 funding, this summer, there were more than 80 hospital ER and unit closures province-wide. These closures will “only intensify” under the current health human resource and hospital funding strategy of the PC provincial government, says Verch.
OCHU-CUPE is also calling on the Ford government to maintain — not eliminate — COVID funding. "We are not done with this virus just yet and long COVID is coming right at us. There are more than 1,200 COVID patients in hospital beds across Ontario, and like front-line hospital staff, the hospitals are also dealing with rising inflation," Verch concludes.
