MEDIA ADVISORY: Struggling with bed, staff shortages now, stability of Kingston hospitals threatened by PC under-funding scheme for next decade: CUPE report released Monday shows

Event Information

Begins: 26 April 2021 @ 1:00 PM
Location: Kingston, ON

KINGSTON, ON –/COMMUNITYWIRE/– Leap 10 years into the future – post the COVID-19 pandemic crisis – to find eastern Ontario hospitals in steady decline as years of PC government budget cuts carve billions of dollars from their budgets. This is a future in which patients get even less bedside care and are at much higher risk of hallway medicine, understaffing, readmissions, hospital acquired infections and medical errors, problems that already bedevil Ontario hospitals.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the longstanding capacity issues in Ontario’s hospital system created by successive provincial governments’ underfunding hospital care and cutting 20,000 beds. But under the PC’s health funding plan laid out in its March budget, things are going to get much worse, says a Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) research paper, Ontario Hospital Crisis: Overcapacity and Under Threat that will be released for Ottawa, Cornwall, Pembroke, Brockville and Kingston on Monday, April 26 at 1 p.m. (http://bit.ly/OCHU210426).

The research report projects staff and funding cuts for eastern Ontario hospitals in Kingston, Ottawa, Pembroke, Quinte/Brockville and Cornwall as examples of the depth of the cuts that are projected.

“As these ongoing cuts take hold, year after year for the next decade, Ontario’s hospitals will stagger as an aging and growing population pits far too many very sick patients against its weakening capacity, says Michael Hurley president of CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU/CUPE). “Patients will be at risk. There will be no surge capacity. This government has learned nothing from the COVID pandemic.”

The Ontario 2021 Budget plans to cut COVID health care funds by $3.25 billion. But, even that will be dwarfed by the cuts that will be required if the government’s funding plans are implemented from 2021-2030, according to the report that uses the government’s own data to extrapolate the projections.

Hurley will be joined at Monday’s media conference by CUPE Researcher, Doug Allan.

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For more information, please contact:

Stella Yeadon     CUPE Communications     416-559-9300    syeadon@cupe.ca