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Crushing hospital debt, lotteries for family doctors paint picture of a health system under pressure
Posted: January 10, 2025
(January 9, 2025) By: Elizabeth Payne, Ottawa Citizen
“We couldn’t squeeze any more out of the budget and we went into deficit,” said one hospital CEO to members of Ontario’s Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs.
“This would give us stability for the next several years. It will help us get out of debt so we can pay our bills and stop paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest charges so we can use all of our funding to operate our hospitals and care for patients.”
Boland said Winchester Hospital was able to balance its budget for years by being careful with spending and taking steps such as closing 20 per cent of in-patient beds to reduce costs. “But there is a limit.”
In 2021 “the well went dry, we couldn’t squeeze any more out of the budget and we went into deficit,” he said. It has continued to post annual deficits since, wiping out its cash reserves and forcing it to borrow money.
Boland said he was not speaking officially for other hospitals, but knew many were in similar, or worse, positions. In fact, he said provincial officials told him other hospitals were in worse shape than Winchester.
Officials at the hospital — which has maintained among the highest patient satisfaction rates in the province — spend too much time thinking about balancing the budget and making payroll “when we are supposed to be thinking about patients,” Boland added.
The committee also heard from Martine Whissel, director of the Eastern Ottawa family health team. She described the difficulty her team had hiring staff because their salaries had not increased in five years. There have been some operational funding increases during that time, she said.
For people like Ottawa resident Kathy Marshall and her family, that can’t happen quickly enough. She, her husband as well as two adult children and their families all learned late last year that their long-time family doctor was closing her practice.
Marshall is 67 and her husband is 72 and takes medication that needs monitoring. She said she didn’t blame her former doctor, but the news was a shock for all of them.
Marshall and her husband found a new physician after being chosen through a lottery. Her children and grandchild are still without primary care, she said. “It was very upsetting trying to find a doctor and joining the throngs.”
The committee also heard from officials at Ottawa’s Queensway Carleton Hospital pitching a new program to train anesthesiologist assistants to help keep operating rooms open.
Ottawa West Nepean NDP MPP Chandra Pasma noted that Queensway Carleton was struggling with overcrowding and inadequate bed capacity for its growing numbers of patients, many with complex needs. The hospital is looking for provincial funding to more than double the size of its emergency department, add 90 new inpatient beds and build a new urgent care clinic.
In a statement, Ministry of Health spokesperson Ema Popovic said the province had increased the health-care budget by more than 31 per cent since 2018, investing $85 billion into the system this year alone, “greater than the total health-care budget of almost every province and territory combined.”
Ontario’s per capita health-care spending was the lowest per capita among provinces in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, according to the Financial Accountability Office.
