A senior Progressive Conservative government source told The Globe and Mail the province will increase the number of surgeries and procedures performed at existing private clinics in the province, using only existing staff. Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Ontario will immediately increase the number of surgeries performed at private health clinics, while assuring critics that further expansion of these facilities will not drain staff from the understaffed public system, under plans to be unveiled early next month a week.
A senior Progressive Conservative government source told The Globe and Mail that the changes include initially increasing the number of surgeries and procedures performed at existing private clinics in the province, using only existing staff — meaning there could be no effect on scarce hospital resources.
The source also said the government would outline further expansion of the role of what it called “community clinics” and “independent health facilities” to carry out even more operations. However, the government will include “specific measures”, which the source did not specify, designed to protect staff at public hospitals. The Globe did not identify the source because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.
Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones have repeatedly said all patients’ procedures will still be covered by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan — not their credit cards. Many publicly funded health services in Ontario, such as X-rays, blood tests and ultrasounds, are performed in private sector facilities, while a small number of other specialized private facilities perform some OHIP-covered operations.
But critics charge that allowing more surgeries at private clinics could only worsen the province’s hospital crisis, where staff shortages amid waves of COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses have caused waiting times to explode and even forced temporary closures at some emergency departments in recent months.
Opposition politicians and health campaigners have warned that the new private clinics will draw nurses and other staff away from the public system, where they are most needed. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, which will inspect all new private health clinics, issued a statement this week saying the idea would worsen staffing shortages and increase wait times for more urgent hospital care.
Proponents say moving more low-risk surgeries out of hospitals and into smaller, specialized and more efficient facilities — whether for-profit or not-for-profit — is a key way to get out of Ontario’s massive backlog of procedures that multiplied during a pandemic. The Ontario Medical Association has called for a similar scheme: its plan calls for the new clinics to operate as not-for-profit organizations affiliated with hospitals.
The government is already increasing the number of surgeries performed at the handful of these facilities in the province that currently perform outpatient surgeries, such as knee replacements, since the pandemic. Both Mr. Ford and Ms. Jones have signaled in recent months that more changes are coming.
In August, as part of the province’s “Stay Open Plan,” Ms. Jones pledged to increase the number of publicly funded procedures performed in “existing private clinics” as well as “consider options” to achieve more in the “independent healthcare facilities.”
John Ip, president and CEO of SE Health Care, a for-profit home care provider, says shifting more surgeries to community clinics — either for-profit or not-for-profit — is a much-needed step he’s taking sought civil servants for years.
A former head of Toronto’s Kensington Eye Institute, a not-for-profit stand-alone clinic that does eye surgery, Mr. Ip told The Globe in an interview that SE Health may be interested in creating a surgery center modeled after Ontario’s new .
He said surgery centers that perform non-emergency and simple procedures would be a “pressure relief valve” for overburdened hospitals that have to care for a wide variety of much sicker patients, including people suffering heart attacks or injured in car crashes. accidents. According to him, half of the procedures performed in a hospital should not be performed there.
Mr. Ip rejects the argument that such clinics would poach scarce hospital workers, saying only improved working conditions in hospitals can ease the problem of staff, burned out by the pandemic, leaving demanding frontline jobs.
“It’s a myth that we cannibalize hospital staff,” Mr Ip said. “The staff have already left the hospitals. … If you’re going to stop this loss, change your work-life balance.”
Ross Sutherland, president of the Ontario Health Coalition, a group backed by health care unions, said the government should spend more in the public system instead of moving surgeries to private clinics.
“Private clinics don’t grow staff on the trees, what they do is take staff from the public system,” Mr. Sutherland said in an interview with The Globe. “They better use hospitals and increase funding.”
Opposition NDP health critic France Gélinas said private clinics are more likely to charge patients for “extra” services above those covered by OHIP — a problem previously identified by the province’s auditor general.
And she warned the move would open the door to more privatized care as companies investing millions of dollars in new clinics look for healthy returns.
“Ask any Canadian, we are proud of Medicare. We don’t want to be like the States. We are proud of what we have,” she said. “There’s a lot of money to be made in health care.”
With reporting by Dustin Cook
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified John Yip as a doctor.
Add Comment