The Canadian Union of Public Employees warns that unless hospitals in northwestern Ontario hire 150 more staff a year, problems with spiking emergency room wait times and unprecedented staffing shortages will deepen as the population ages.
The union says it is basing its numbers on available government and hospital data.
For example, the average length of ER wait time at Lake of the Woods hospital in Kenora increased 14.6% between July 2021 and July 2022.
CUPE says Ontario ER wait times have increased 47% in the last year alone.
David Verch from the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions says the Ford government has to create a hospital workforce retention plan.
“There is a massive amount of turnover right now,” says Verch.
“We’re at a 14.95% turnover rate. We’ve never seen levels of health care workers leaving at this level before. You know these issues are then directly related to our ER’s.”
He states 46,000 more hospital staff would have to be hired across Ontario to meet demand.
Verch says we can expect more ER closures, like the one at the hospital in Red Lake this past summer, if the staffing crisis is not solved.
CUPE says the health care crisis isn’t just limited to hospitals.
The number of paramedics in the district is not keeping up with an increase in calls.
That’s the feeling of Derek Hamilton, who works for the Northwest Emergency Response Service and is president of CUPE local 5911.
“We were able in our fall hire to only hire a single paramedic. However, we just received notification that we’ll be losing two this month. That has already put us behind where we started.”
Hamilton says in the Kenora District last year, call volumes increased by almost 17%, compared to the provincial average of 4% this past decade.
The KDSB recently received an extra $1 million in provincial funding to hire additional paramedics but the Kenora District Services Board stressed more needs to be done.
Hamilton notes says the stressful working conditions for paramedics have created a major retention and recruitment problem and called on the provincial government to address that through a comprehensive staffing strategy for paramedics in northern Ontario.
He says, “The high call volumes across Kenora District stem from social problems that must be tackled through investments in affordable housing, mental health and addictions services, family doctors, home care and community programs.”
(With files from Tim Davidson)
