London needs 300 beds, 3000 employees to ease healthcare crisis

London needs hundreds of more beds and thousands of more employees in its hospitals to ease the health-care crunch facing the community, a new report says.

At a news conference in the city Friday, Michael Hurley of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions urged Queen’s Park to invest more in hospitals amid a “crisis” facing the institutions here and provincewide.

“We’re calling on the government to step it up so we can move forward with a real plan that addresses the health-care crisis,” said Hurley, whose council is part of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).

CUPE is Canada’s largest union, representing nearly 300,000 health-care, emergency services and education workers in Ontario.

The group’s report, The Hospital Crisis: No Capacity, No Plan, No End, calls for the addition of 343 beds and 3,094 staff in London hospitals over the next four years to “grow capacity.”

Hurley said thousands of jobs are unfilled at London hospitals and across the province. “Who bears the brunt of this? The elderly do and this is a situation only destined to get worse,” he said.

But it doesn’t need to be like this, Hurley said.

“The government needs to take responsibility for population growth and particularly for aging (population growth),” he said. “It’s like we decided we’re not going to finance care for this part of the population that so desperately needs it.”

Doug Allan, a CUPE hospital sector researcher, noted the Progressive Conservatives pledged on taking power in 2018 they would end so-called “hallway health care,” in which hospitals are so full patients are kept in hospital corridors.

“In fact, it’s gotten worse,” Allan said.

A spokesperson for Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones said the government has increased the health-care budget by more than $16 billion, added more than 63,000 nurses and 8,000 physicians and built 3,500 hospital beds provincewide.

A London Health Sciences Centre spokesperson said though they couldn’t speak to the content of CUPE’s report, because the numbers are not specific to their hospitals, they “are not immune to the challenges facing Ontario’s health-care system.

“We continue to implement innovative new ways to recruit and retain front-line staff, and as we do this, our vacancy rate is dropping,” the spokesperson said by email. “LHSC consistently hires about 150 to 250 new team members each month, some of which are from the region and others from abroad.”

The hospital has developed a wellness strategy to retain staff after they’ve been hired, she said.

St. Joseph’s Health Care London declined to comment as they have no staff represented by CUPE. TimminsPress