Challenges to sustainability

Ontario’s health-care system has been under stress for a number of years. Ontarians have grown increasingly concerned about the fate of the system, given a number of alarming signs:

• Emergency departments continue to suffer from crowding, to the extent that many patients are too often forced to go on redirect or critical care bypass status.
• Health-care experts point out that the emergency departments are the “canaries in the mine shaft.” ER crowding can reflect myriad other problems in the system. People end up in ERs because they cannot get care elsewhere.

RNAO Resources · The Canada Health Act: To Preserve and Protect Referencing this page?

This may be due to:

• Lack of 24-7 primary health care,
• The absence of robust home health care and long-term care sectors
• A shortage of nursing and other professional staff in our hospitals.
• Waiting lists that have become unacceptably long for certain procedures.
• Those patients who are served by the system are on average more acutely ill than they were in the past.

This reflects several factors:

• Shorter lengths of stay in hospitals
• An aging population and a lack of community-based and wellness-oriented services to respond to their needs
• Limited resources, meaning that resources are being allocated away from less ill people
• A trend to deinstitutionalization, which may be appropriate in some but not all cases

Many health-care professionals are dangerously overworked. Not only has this contributed to increased sick time and early retirement, but it has also limited their ability to deliver quality care. For example, many nurses express extreme frustration in not having the time to deliver the care that they know their patients require. RNAO estimates that, as of 1999, the average nurse had to cover 25 per cent more of the population than they did in 1986. The situation has deteriorated to the point where many nurses have left the province, or have left the profession entirely.

Back to A Reformed and Sustainable System
Back to Strengthening Medicare

Back to RNAO Knowledge Depot home

Adapted from:

• The Canada Health Act: To Preserve and Protect
• Sustainability for Uncertain Times: Submission to the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs (Offline).

Referencing this page?