“Hospital crisis.” Ontario requires an additional 60,000 staff members and 8,000 more beds to tackle the ongoing crisis.

The union representing 40,000 hospital workers in Ontario is sounding the alarm, asserting that the existing “hospital crisis” will deteriorate further unless the province commits to a substantial increase in hospital beds and staffing beyond current plans within the next four years.

On Thursday morning, Michael Hurley, the President of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU), and Doug Allan, the Hospital Sector Researcher at CUPE, presented their report titled “The Hospital Crisis: No Capacity, No Plan, No End.”

Based on their most recent data, the union calculates that Ontario must augment both bed capacity and staff levels by 22 percent over the next four years to adequately cater to the needs of the province’s aging and expanding population. This translates to the addition of approximately 8,170 more hospital beds and the recruitment of an additional 60,000 staff, according to the union’s assessment.

When considering Toronto in isolation, the union recommends the addition of roughly 2,270 hospital beds and the recruitment of approximately 11,960 more hospital workers.

“We have people pushed out of hospital while they’re still acutely ill, we have people who can’t get into hospital, we have people dying on waiting lists, we have emergency departments going down,” Hurley said at a news conference at Queens Park.”

“Staff in Ontario hospitals are cracking under the weight of this tsunami of an aging and growing population, and when you layer on top of that factors like, COVID, RSV, flu, then, you know, you have a system which had no excess capacity to begin with, stretched to the breaking point.”

The consequences of this staffing shortage are indeed profound, resulting in a substantial number of emergency room closures. These closures are particularly impactful in small and rural communities throughout the province.

In accordance with the findings of the Financial Accountability Office (FAO), as reported in March, Ontario experienced 145 unplanned emergency department closures last year due to a combination of staffing shortages and heightened demand exceeding capacity.

Furthermore, the report highlights that the practice of caring for patients in hallways has reached an unprecedented peak. According to the union’s research, the number of inpatients receiving care in hallways has risen to 1,289 per day, marking a 22 percent increase since 2018.

This situation has also had a detrimental impact on the number of surgeries being carried out. Referring to the FAO’s report, it is revealed that 107,000 patients are currently enduring wait times that exceed the maximum clinical guidelines for their surgeries. Additionally, there has been a reduction of 4,523 surgeries conducted each month compared to the figures from 2019.

“The numbers in this report are staggering,” said Ontario Greens leader Mike Schreiner  “It’s an extra year spent on a never-ending waitlist. It’s being forced to drive two or three towns over for emergency care because your ER is closed.”

Back in July, the Ford government unveiled a plan to allocate an extra $44 million in funding aimed at mitigating emergency room wait times and extending this support to smaller hospitals, those with fewer than 30,000 ER visits annually.

Health Minister Sylvia Jones stated at the time that this funding would benefit up to 90 additional hospitals throughout the province. “allowing them to further address staffing challenges and mitigate closures.”

“Our government is expanding capacity across the province, getting shovels in the ground for nearly 60 hospital developments over 10 years that will add thousands of beds across the province, to connect Ontarians to the care they need now and into the future,”

“Since 2018 our government has increased the health care budget by over $16 billion dollars, grown our health care workforce by over 63,000 nurses and 8,000 new physicians and built 3,500 hospital beds across the province.”

Nonetheless, OCHU/CUPE contends that the government’s strategy to introduce 3,000 new hospital beds over the course of the next ten years falls short. They argue that this increment would only account for a meager 0.79 percent annual expansion in capacity. This is notably insufficient, especially in light of projections indicating that the province’s population is expected to increase by 1.5 percent annually over the same ten-year period.