Guelph General Hospital needs an extra $12.4 million in provincial funding next year just to maintain its current service levels.
That, according to a new research report from CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions.
The union said Ontario’s hospital spending needs to go up by $2 billion annually. But if that is just to maintain the status quo, the union warns the “worst is yet to come” for an increasingly aging population.
“Ontario’s experiencing unprecedented hospital capacity problems,” said Doug Allan, senior researcher at CUPE National and author of the report, during a stop in Guelph Thursday.
“This is the result of a long process of degradation of the hospital system. But it’s been made worse under the regime of the Ford government and has now come to a crisis that we haven’t seen ever in Ontario.”
Officials were in Guelph to discuss the “perfect storm” impacting the health care sector, from an aging population, population growth, a lack of hospital and long-term care beds, hospital wait time increases and staffing shortages.
The report stated Ontario needs 16,800 more beds by 2032. For comparison, the province has stated it plans to increase capacity by 3,000 beds in that time.
That is a shortfall of 13,800 over the next eight years.
For Guelph, CUPE estimated it needs 262 more beds in that time, or 26 extra beds per year.
“We’re in a bad situation now, it’s going to get significantly worse unless … we can convince the government that they have to add beds,” Allan said.
Hospital wait times have gone up in the last 12 months in Ontario. According to Public Health Ontario data reported in June, the average wait time for admission is 19 hours.
In Guelph, the wait time was 11.9 hours. The data also suggests 39 per cent of those admitted to Guelph hospital from the ER got in under the target time of eight hours.
Job vacancies have gone up 534 per cent since 2015. There is also an anticipated shortage of more than 80,000 staff by 2032 province-wide, according to the report.
Of note, Allan said 15,396 full-time nurses are needed to match staffing capacity in the rest of Canada.
In Guelph, he estimates 190 extra staff per year is needed. Allan was quick to point out that is net new staff, not just 190 new hires.
“The government often confuses hiring people with adding people,” he said.
“It’s not the same because people quit, people go away, they flee.”
On long-term care, Allan pointed out the lack of beds there is also compounding the issue in hospitals.
With a 2018 promise to increase beds by 30,000 by 2028, the provincial budget noted only 2,246 new beds have been created so far, or 7.5 per cent.
But an issue that’s equally compounding is that some long-term care homes are shutting down.
This includes LaPointe-Fisher Nursing Home on Metcalfe Street, who will cease operations as of Nov. 29, with 69 residents needing to look for a new place to stay.
All in all, Allan believes the request of boosting spending by $2 billion a year isn’t much of an ask to maintain the status quo.
“They can do this if they want to,” he said. “Last year, they did an actual bigger funding increase for the provincial government.”
“We’re actually oddly demanding a smaller increase than last year.”
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health released a statement in response to CUPE's claims, noting "record investments" made in the health care system under the Ford government.
The spokesperson stated over $85 billion has been invested this year, up 31 per cent from 2018.
"We have increased our investment across the hospital sector by 4 per cent for a record two years in a row, we are getting shovels in the ground for over 50 hospital development projects across the province, building on the over 3,500 hospital beds we have added since 2020, that is double the beds the Liberals built in 14 years," they told GuelphToday in an emailed statement.
"Over the last two years, we have registered a record number of new nurses, adding 32,000 new nurses, with another 30,000 studying nursing at one of Ontario’s Colleges or Universities and since 2018, we have added over 12,500 new doctors to the healthcare workforce. But we are not stopping there.
"We have broken down barriers for internationally educated healthcare workers, while allowing healthcare workers registered in other provinces and territories to immediately start working in Ontario, removed financial barriers for nurses wanting to upskill, expended the Learn and Stay grant to provide eligible students in nursing with funding for tuition, books and other costs. We have also made changes to expand RNs scope of practice so they can work to the full extent of their training while launching the largest expansion of medical school seats in the last 15 years.
"Together these changes have allowed Ontario to achieve some of the lowest wait times across the country and the highest attachment rate to primary care.”
