Tag: Ontario

Ontario budget: billions of dollars of new funding for health care





Liam Casey, The Canadian Press







Published Tuesday, March 26, 2024 4:21PM EDT






Last Updated Tuesday, March 26, 2024 4:50PM EDT

TORONTO – Ontario is set to inject billions of new dollars into health care, the budget for the upcoming fiscal year shows.

The province said it is investing $2 billion over three years in home care services, nearly $1 billion more for hospitals and hundreds of millions to expand primary care coverage.

“Ontarians are also counting on us to maintain a strong health-care system now and for future generations,” said Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy as he released the budget on Tuesday.

The province previously committed $1 billion over three years as part of its reforms for home and community care, which sees care providedat home or in a community setting by nurses, personal support workers and others.

“I don’t know many people who don’t want to age at home with their loved ones in familiar surroundings,” Bethlenfalvy said.

The finance minister said the new money for home care will be spent on increasing compensation for nurses, personal support workers and other front-line home care providers.

“A big chunk of this money is going to supporting the wages and recruiting and retaining more health-care workers so they can take care of people where they want to be taken care of,” Bethlenfalvy said.

Home care agencies have struggled to attract and retain nurses and personal support workers because there is more pay for those professions in hospitals and long-term care homes.

Home Care Ontario, which represents agencies that provide about 28,000 health-care workers who are sent to people’s homes, applauded the new funding.

“Today’s historic investment in the province’s home care system is great news for

Sudbury news: Trudeau talks about northern Ontario healthcare

The prime minister was in northern Ontario on Friday to talk about healthcare in the region.

Last month, Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford signed a $3.1 billion healthcare deal – a three-year agreement meant to improve access to primary healthcare and reduce wait times.

PM Justin Trudeau (centre) speaks at Health Sciences North hospital in Sudbury, MPs Viviane Lapoite (second from left) and Marc Serre (second from right) also made remarks. March 1/24 (Angela Gemmill/CTV Northern Ontario)“Even within provinces we know there are different needs within different regions,” said Trudeau to the media while speaking at Health Sciences North (HSN.)

The PM highlighted details specific to northern Ontario from the recent deal with the province.

Federal officials said the funding is all part of a $200 billion investment for all of Canada, over the next 10 years.

“We also have to be honest that our healthcare systems haven’t been meeting the mark of what Canadians expect, over the past years,” said Trudeau.

The PM announced an additional 30 undergraduate and 41 post-graduate spots to be created at northern Ontario’s only medical school, NOSM University to help address the region’s doctor shortage.

Trudeau said the federal government is also moving forward with better training on anti-indigenous racism.

HSN president and CEO David McNeil said the facility works to create culturally safe space for all patients.

“Ensuring that we’re providing care for all people in a way where they feel culturally safe regardless of their background or culture is a key priority of Health Sciences North,” he said.

Other highlights include increasing cancer screening through mobile units and more primary health teams across under-serviced areas in the north.

Ontario was the fifth province to sign a new healthcare deal – joining Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Prince

Ontario hospital faces slow climb to safe storage of health records after cyberattack

Bluewater Health, hardest hit in a massive cyberattack on five Southwestern Ontario hospitals last fall, is belatedly taking steps to modernize its aging technology for storing and sharing patients’ electronic health records.

The Sarnia-based hospital announced on Jan. 10 that it has selected Oracle Cerner, a large U.S.-based health-records vendor, to build its new patient-records system. The upgraded system will not be up and running until the end of this year.

Bluewater is the only hospital that had its electronic medical records stolen. The other four – Windsor Regional Hospital, Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, Chatham-Kent Health Alliance and Erie Shores HealthCare – use Oracle Cerner to house their patients’ health records, which is recognized as one of the most advanced and secure systems in the world.

As an interim measure, Bluewater is working on restoring the health-information system it has used for more than 30 years. That system, Meditech, has been shut down since the attack last Oct. 23, leaving Bluewater lagging behind the other four hospitals in getting back online.

The breach forced the hospitals to cancel thousands of diagnostic tests and send cancer patients to other health care centres in London, Toronto and Detroit. Emergency departments became busier than normal.

Patient care is pretty much back to normal at all the hospitals, with the exception of Bluewater, which cares for 131,000 residents of Sarnia-Lambton. Its backlog of appointments for MRIs, CT Scans, mammograms, ultrasounds and other tests had grown to 8,000 as of last week from 5,200 in mid-December, said Bluewater spokesman Keith Marnoch.

“We anticipate that the system will be operational for hospital-wide use in limited capacity within the coming weeks,” he told The Globe and Mail.

The hospital’s leadership had committed back in 2013 to updating its system but never followed through. As a result of that

Ontario government document shows historically bad emergency department wait times

Long waits in emergency departments result in harm to patients, doctors told The Trillium

One in every 10 patients admitted to a hospital in Ontario from an emergency department waits at least two days before they get a bed, according to an internal government document.

The nearly 50 hours from the moment those patients walk in the door to the time they’re in an inpatient bed is a historical high. The long waits on stretches in emergency departments result in actual harm to the province’s most vulnerable, emergency physicians told The Trillium.

“They’re sick, they’re frail, they’ve come in late,” said Alan Drummond, an emergency physician in Perth, who had four patients on stretchers in his small, rural emergency department the day he spoke with The Trillium. “They need to be admitted. They’re stuck in a hospital hallway for 24, 36, 48 hours, and waiting for that hospital bed to materialize.

“And while they’re there, they suffer increasing complications in terms of their medical illness. They have delayed access to the treatments that would be necessary should they have been admitted. They develop delirium. They get totally confused. Their dementia gets worse. And we know there’s a mortality rate — people actually die as a result of that prolonged wait for bed admission.”

Raghu Venugopal, an emergency physician in Toronto, described what he saw before speaking with The Trillium on Tuesday when the emergency department was too busy for paramedics to offload their patients: rows and rows of stretchers “filled with silver and gray-haired senior citizens silhouetted on Orange EMS blankets.” 

“I will physically go see that patient, I will see them in the corridor, I will see them on the paramedic’s stretcher, I will see them in the back of a triage office or in the waiting

Acute health care use among children during the first 2.5 years of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada: a population-based repeated cross-sectional study

Abstract

Background: The effects of the decline in health care use at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health of children are unclear. We sought to estimate changes in rates of severe and potentially preventable health outcomes among children during the pandemic.

Methods: We conducted a repeated cross-sectional study of children aged 0–17 years using linked population health administrative and disease registry data from January 2017 through August 2022 in Ontario, Canada. We compared observed rates of emergency department visits and hospital admissions during the pandemic to predicted rates based on the 3 years preceding the pandemic. We evaluated outcomes among children and neonates overall, among children with chronic health conditions and among children with specific diseases sensitive to delays in care.

Results: All acute care use for children decreased immediately at the onset of the pandemic, reaching its lowest rate in April 2020 for emergency department visits (adjusted relative rate [RR] 0.28, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.28–0.29) and hospital admissions (adjusted RR 0.43, 95% CI 0.42–0.44). These decreases were sustained until September 2021 and May 2022, respectively. During the pandemic overall, rates of all-cause mortality, admissions for ambulatory care–sensitive conditions, newborn readmissions or emergency department visits or hospital admissions among children with chronic health conditions did not exceed predicted rates. However, after declining significantly between March and May 2020, new presentations of diabetes mellitus increased significantly during most of 2021 (peak adjusted RR 1.49, 95% CI 1.28–1.74 in July 2021) and much of 2022. Among these children, presentations for diabetic ketoacidosis were significantly higher than expected during the pandemic overall (adjusted RR 1.14, 95% CI 1.00–1.30). We observed similar time trends for new presentations of cancer, but we observed no excess presentations of severe cancer overall (adjusted RR 0.91, 95% CI 0.62–1.34).

Interpretation: In the first 30

Ontario healthcare providers now face possible fines for ‘severe’ data privacy violations

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Healthcare providers covered by Ontario’s privacy law have an extra incentive to follow provincial data protection regulations: They now face administrative fines for serious violations of the provincial law.

As of Jan. 1, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario can issue penalties of up to a maximum of $50,000 for individuals and $500,000 for organizations that violate the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA).

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Ontario hospital ERs have closed 867 times this year, coalition says

“The numbers are like nothing we have seen before.”

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Emergency departments and other hospital services have closed a record number of times in Ontario so far in 2023, according to a new Ontario Health Coalition report being described as “staggering.”

As of Nov. 24, there had been 867 temporary emergency department closures in the province this year, including more than a dozen temporary overnight closures at Carleton Place & District Memorial Hospital, mostly earlier this year, and a handful at Almonte General Hospital, the most recent just in November. Arnprior Regional Health also temporarily closed its emergency department twice overnight, in May. All three hospitals are located outside Ottawa.

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Staff shortages crippled some emergency departments in Ontario: auditor general

The number of emergency department closures and a crisis in health-care staffing has increased and compounded in recent years, largely driven by the province’s inability to properly staff hospitals, Ontario’s auditor general has found.

A new probe into emergency departments by the province’s acting auditor general has found wait times are up, closures have become increasingly common, and some hospitals are being crippled with as many as one in four jobs left unfilled.

The audit found unplanned emergency department closures were “very rare” before 2019 and the beginning of 2020. In recent years, however, the number of closures has skyrocketed, with a lack of staff a key driver.

In a year from July 2022 to June 2023, the report recorded 203 emergency department closures in the province taking place at 23 hospitals, which were mainly in rural and remote parts of Ontario.

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Despite the rising closures, the Ministry of Health has “never collected or tracked” information on staffing shortages or vacancies in emergency rooms. The acting auditor general’s team reached out to several hospitals and “all of them experienced a significant increase in nursing vacancies” between 2019-2020 and 2023.

At some hospitals the jump in unfilled nursing jobs was stark.

William Osler Health System, which runs hospitals in Brampton and Etobicoke, had a nursing vacancy rate of six per cent in 2019-2020; by 2022-2023, it had risen to 26 per cent. Sinai Health System in Toronto saw its unfilled jobs jump from three per cent to 19 per cent. And Sick Kids in Toronto went from an eight per cent vacancy rate to 22 per cent for full-time registered nurses.

“We noted multiple reasons for high staff turnover at emergency departments, especially among nurses,” the auditor general’s report said. “Factors included the higher pay and flexibility

Study finds lower health-care costs among Ontario patients who had female surgeons





Camille Bains, The Canadian Press







Published Wednesday, November 29, 2023 11:22PM EST






Last Updated Wednesday, November 29, 2023 11:22PM EST

Patients treated by female surgeons incur lower health-care costs than those treated by male surgeons, suggests an Ontario-based study of more than one million people.

The study examined health data for adult patients who had 25 common elective and emergency operations between 2007 and 2019. It found that one month, three months and one year after the patients’ procedures, costs were about 10 per cent lower for those whose surgeon was a woman.

Dr. Angela Jerath, a cardiac anesthesiologist at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and one of the study authors, said that represents significant savings for the health-care system – estimated at about $6.7 billion over one year – but more research is needed to better understand the factors behind the cost difference.

How female surgeons communicate with patients and other members of the surgical team may play a role, said Jerath, also a professor at the University of Toronto.

“There may also be differences in how we make decisions, how we make judgments around what kind of care a patient needs, either before the procedure and after the procedure. This is an area where we’re still working out what are the sex disparities in that process,” she said.

“These are sections of care that are not formally taught. There’s no gold standard way of how you follow someone up and keep an eye on whether — after your surgery, for example — you’re developing a pneumonia or something like that.”

So far, results of the study have received a “mixed bag” of responses, with some surgeons saying they are more conscientious and

Data on 267,000 Sarnia patients going back 3 decades among cyberattack thefts at 5 Ontario hospitals

Patients’ information — including the reasons for their visits — going back three decades from Bluewater Health in Sarnia, Ont., and its predecessor hospitals is among the data confirmed stolen in the cyberattack on five southwestern Ontario hospitals.

Transform, the hospital’s IT provider, now confirms a database report containing information on 267,000 patients was taken. The report includes details about “every patient” seen at Bluewater Health and its predecessors since Feb. 24, 1992.

Those predecessor institutions are:

  • Lambton Hospitals Group.
  • Charlotte Eleanor Englehart Hospital of Bluewater Health.
  • Sarnia General Hospital.
  • St. Joseph’s Hospital. 

“We condemn the actions of cyber criminals, in the health-care sector and elsewhere, in our communities and around the world,” Transform said in a statement Thursday that was distributed by the hospitals. 

“We understand the concern this incident has raised within our communities, including patients and our employees and professional staff, and we deeply apologize.”

The database report taken from Bluewater Health includes names and addresses, as well as the reason for the visit and “general notes on prior registrations” among other personal information. 

WATCH | What group claiming it’s behind cyberattack says about how it got into Ontario hospital systems:

According to a blog, cybercriminal group Daixin says it has attacked the hospitals in southwestern Ontario and forced them to go dark. CBC’s Jennifer La Grassa breaks down more details the group shared about how it got into hospital systems.

Cybercriminal group claims responsibility for ransomware attack on hospitals

Featured VideoAccording to a blog, cybercriminal group Daixin says it has attacked the hospitals in southwestern Ontario and forced them to go dark. CBC’s Jennifer La Grassa breaks down more details the group shared about how it got into hospital systems.

Social insurance numbers for about 20,000 patients at Bluewater Health and the other hospitals were

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