One does not have to look far to see the issues of staff shortages in our health care system. On Friday, the Lake of the Woods District Hospital posted on Facebook a notice that the LWDH Emergency Department was facing staffing shortages over the long weekend. Emergency wait times were expected to be much longer than normal. That hospital was not alone in the province or across Canada. Fourteen different hospitals across Ontario gave notice that their emergency rooms would be closed over the past long weekend.
Riverside is looking to fill 62 health and support positions in its facilities across the Rainy River District. In the Hamilton area more than 700 positions remain unfilled.
Lakeridge Hospital network in eastern Toronto provided notice that the ICU unit in Bowmanville was being closed because of staff shortages and patients were being moved to Ajax Pickering and Oshawa hospitals.
In Fort Frances, the Family Health team was advertising for two positions in the clinic. In some areas, primary health care services have had to be rolled back or curtailed because positions could not be filled.
Gizhewaadiziwin Health Access Centre located on Couchiching First Nation is looking for five health care workers.
There are no easy fixes. I joked with another senior this past week, that seniors are the biggest clients of the medical system in Canada. The warnings have been long posted that the aging baby-boomer group were going to have a major impact on health came in Canada. It is coming true. Baby boomer doctors are retiring in droves. Canada’s population has grown.
The pandemic has exhausted nurses and health care providers, and many are leaving the profession for their own health. In Ontario Bill C-124 has limited salary increases to 1 per cent for public employees, beginning prior to the start of the pandemic. In some cases, those exhausted nurses are leaving hospitals and returning almost the next day, employed by agencies and being paid much more than when they were working directly for the hospitals. That money is being taken from other hospital priorities.
One of the answers is for the province to lift Bill C-124 and pay nurses and other primary health care workers more. Another is to make it easier for foreign trained nurses and doctors to practise in Ontario. And to meet the number of doctors and nurses retiring, expand the number of student positions for nursing and doctors across the university network of Ontario and Canada.
None of these actions will happen overnight. It takes nurses, doctors, nurse practitioners, and physiotherapists many years to be certified. It is a long-term process and will need over a decade to begin seeing results. In the meantime, you can expect more difficulty in being treated for health issues.
Former Publisher
Fort Frances Times
