Staff shortages have forced emergency rooms and other key health care facilities across Ontario to shut their doors nearly 1,200 times this year, according to numbers compiled by the Ontario Health Coalition, a union-backed advocacy group.
The report, being released on Tuesday, says there were at least 1,199 temporary or permanent closings of health care services from Jan. 1 to Nov. 24 of this year. The coalition says the shutdowns amounted to the equivalent of 30,155 hours of lost care, or 3.44 years.
Similar problems have been documented across the country, not just in Ontario, as health care systems continue to struggle with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to staff shortages, widespread closings, jammed intensive care units and ballooning surgery wait times.
The Ontario Health Coalition’s tally includes shortened opening hours, as well as temporary complete closings. The group found that smaller and rural hospitals were the most affected. And it wasn’t just ERs: The report says maternity wards and other facilities have had to go dark because of staffing issues.
“It really is shocking,” Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition, said in an interview. “You have to say: What would define a crisis, what would define a crumbling health system, if it wasn’t this?”
The group says there were 867 temporary closings of emergency rooms in Ontario this year, and one permanent closing, in Minden, Ont., which shut its ER down for good on June 1. Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones has said the Minden shutdown was a decision by the local hospital board, not her ministry.
In addition, 316 urgent-care centres shut their doors temporarily, as did 11 obstetrics units, two outpatient laboratories, and one intensive care unit.
That ICU, at Hamilton General Hospital, shut down one-third of its beds because of a lack of nurses for a few days in July, forcing patients to be diverted elsewhere, the coalition says.
A labour and delivery unit, at the Hôpital Notre-Dame in Hearst, a town in Northern Ontario, shut down indefinitely on June 23, the report says, leaving patients there to travel over an hour to the nearest such unit in Kapuskasing.
In Durham, Ont. – a town in Grey County, about two hours northwest of Toronto – the local ER shut temporarily 51 times in 2023, the report says.
The closings have forced some patients in rural areas to travel long distances, sometimes with little or no warning, the coalition says.
The group warns there could have been more closings that went unreported, as its numbers were compiled from reports in local media, on social media and from hospital websites across the province.
To blame, the coalition says, is a continuing lack of staff, something it says predates the COVID-19 crisis but has been made worse by pandemic burnout and an Ontario law that temporarily limited public-sector wage increases to 1 per cent. The provincial government is fighting to reinstate that legislation after it was struck down by a court.
The coalition also says the government has failed to fund small and rural hospitals properly.
Hannah Jensen, a spokesperson for the Health Minister, said in an e-mail that the provincial government is tackling the problem, including by spending $44-million to help keep more ERs open.
Ms. Jensen added that the government has also extended a summer program that provided temporary physicians for rural and smaller hospitals into this fall.
And she said Ontario has added 15,000 new nurses and 2,400 new physicians as a result of changes meant to break down barriers that prevent foreign-trained health workers, and those from other provinces, from working in Ontario.
Ontario Opposition NDP Leader Marit Stiles said Monday the government should cancel its plans to spend public dollars on surgeries in new and expanded private clinics, which the government has said it needs to do in order to tackle wait times. She called on the government to put money back into the public system, which she said is in a human-resources crisis.
She said small hospitals are “hemorrhaging” money on expensive private nursing agencies to replace scarce permanent staff and keep their doors open.
“Pay nurses a respectable wage,” Ms. Stiles told reporters. “Make sure that you are actually respecting our health care workers.”
Jeff Gray