TORONTO — Premier Doug Ford has announced the details of a three-step plan which the government says will reduce wait times for surgeries and other medical procedures.
The plan involves utilizing private clinics — referred to in an announcement Monday as community surgical and diagnostic centres — a move that five major healthcare unions quickly rejected, saying it will damage access to public health care.
The government announcement stated that its plan will better integrate these existing state-of-the-art facilities to speed up how quickly Ontarians are able to get surgeries and procedures using the health card.
The first step is aimed at a backlog for cataract surgery, a procedure that has one of the longest waitlists.
New partnerships with private facilities in Windsor, Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa will lead to 14,000 additional surgeries each year, or about 25 per cent of the current waitlist.
The province will also invest more than $18 million in existing centres to cover care for patients needing MRI and CT scans, cataract surgery, other ophthalmic surgery, minimally-invasive gynecological surgery, and plastic surgery such as soft tissue repair to hands.
According to the government, this will help return surgical wait lists to pre-pandemic levels by March 2023.
In step two, the province will expand the scope of private facilities with a continued focus on cataracts, as well as MRI and CT imaging and non-urgent, low-risk colonoscopy and endoscopy procedures.
The government said this will shorten wait times while allowing hospitals to focus on more complex and high-risk surgeries.
Step three will see clinics conducting more MRI and CT scans, and by 2024 the expansion of surgery for hip and knee replacements.
Private surgical and diagnostic centres already perform 26,000 OHIP-insured surgeries and procedures annually.
The government said the expansion of services in private facilities will be done with measures in place to protect the stability of health human resources at public hospitals, including requiring new clinics to provide detailed staffing plans, and requiring a number of physicians at these centres to have active privileges at their local hospital.
The Ontario Medical Association and Ontario Hospital Association welcomed the announcement.
"It is essential that the expanded use of community surgical centres into new areas of clinical activity take place in a planned manner with appropriate change management and risk management measures in place...by working together as Team Ontario, we can overcome any challenge and deliver on our shared commitment to strengthening our public healthcare system," Ontario Hospital Association president Anthony Dale said.
Ontario Medical Association president Dr. Rose Zacharias said experience elsewhere has shown that providing outpatient surgeries and procedures in the community greatly improves the patient experience.
"We look forward to working with the government...to make sure these new centres do not take resources away from hospitals or exacerbate existing health human resources challenges," she said.
Healthcare unions were prepared in advance to respond to Ford's announcement, and almost simultaneously released a joint statement saying it will risk lives and significantly worsen staffing shortages.
The labour groups — which included the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Ontario Nurses Association, Ontario Public Service Employees Union, SEIU Healthcare and Unifor — said for-profit clinics have already cost Ontarians "enormously" and have seriously worsened the staffing shortage in the public system.
"With rising living costs and inflation, Ontarians need investment in publicly-delivered healthcare, not a model that will use public funds to generate private profits while decreasing access to all," they said.
Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU/CUPE), accused the government of slashing hospital budgets while aggressively funding for-profit surgical centres.
"User fees, higher costs, higher death rates and the loss of hospital staff won't impede this government's commitment to monetize surgeries. For that, opposition by the hospital workforce and the people of Ontario is needed. Fierce resistance form both will be forthcoming," he said.
Unifor Ontario regional director Naureen Rizvi charged that the plan runs counter to the principles of the public health care system, and that allowing private clinics "to profit by performing essential health procedures...is not a solution to our health care crisis. It will simply make it worse by exacerbating the staffing shortages in our public system and diverting funding away from public hospitals and clinics."