Ontario to fund more private clinic surgeries, send patients to temporary LTCs to ease health-care pressures

Ontario is hoping to ease health-care pressures by increasing publicly covered surgeries at private clinics, waiving the exam and registration fees for internationally trained nurses, and sending patients waiting for a long-term care bed to a home not of their choosing.

On Thursday, Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced the plan that aims to hire more health professionals, free up hospital beds and reduce surgical wait lists. The plan comes as nursing staff shortages have seen emergency departments across the province close throughout the summer for hours or days at a time.

On long-term care, the government plans to introduce legislation today that will allow patients awaiting a bed to be transferred to a "temporary" home while they await space in their preferred home. It's also taking 300 beds that had been used for COVID-19 isolation and making them available for people on wait lists, and says there is a potential to do that with 1,000 more beds within six months.

However, Long-Term Care Minister Paul Calandra said the legislation would not force anybody who doesn't want to leave the hospital to go, nor would it make "any changes to the priority waiting list." 

Calandra also said the legislation would "allow us to continue the conversation" of moving patients temporarily to homes when they no longer require hospital care but their preferred long-term care home has not yet become available.

"The changes do allow us to continue that conversation to explain to somebody who is in a hospital why their needs can be met in a long-term care home," said Calandra.

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But NDP health critic France Gélinas said the province would be better off bolstering the home-care system with more full-time personal support workers. 

"Giving people the choice of where they want to be is to respect them," she said. "Now, hospitals will have the right to put a ton of pressure on you and on your family to move you to the first bed available, not the bed of your choice… This is disrespectful, this is not the way health care should be."

Gélinas suggested the first available beds would likely be "in a private, for-profit home," some of which were the subject of a scathing military report in 2020 after suffering some of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the province.

In the provincial document, there is mention of "mandatory guidelines used by placement coordinators to ensure patients continue to stay close to a partner, spouse, loved ones or friends."

The document outlines more of a role for privately delivered but publicly covered services, with the government saying it will invest more to increase surgeries in pediatric hospitals and existing private clinics covered by OHIP. It is also considering options for further increasing surgical capacity by increasing the number of those procedures performed at "independent health facilities."

Jones said Ontario needs to be "bold, innovative and creative" when looking for ways to improve the health system.

"There are some who will fight for the status quo no matter what," she said at a news conference announcing the plan.