Healthcare in Ontario faces more staff shortages, budget cuts

Ontario needs more nurses to deal with the burgeoning shortage of staff.

The province will be short 26,000 nurses and, for the ninth consecutive year, continue to have the worst RN-to-population ratio in the country, the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario says.  

The RNAO said the situation is “getting worse despite recent provincial investments in health care.”

The association says the province is boosting nursing in private clinics and agencies, but the number of nurses in hospitals, community health and long-term care facilities is dwindling.

“The province now needs 26,000 additional registered nurses (RN) just to catch up to the RN-to-population ratio in the rest of Canada – a profound gap that has widened by three per cent since 2022,” it says. 

France Gélinas, Nickel Belt NDP MPP and the party’s health critic said she’s seeing residents across Ontario struggle with the healthcare system.  

“I mean, five million Ontarians right now do not have access to primary care,” she told Humber Et Cetera. “They don't have a family doctor. They don't have a nurse practitioner.

“Those numbers are expected to get worse. Every month, they get worse. Physicians retire, and no new physicians go into family practice,” she said. 

Gélinas expressed her growing concerns about Premier Doug Ford's move to reduce public healthcare funding and instead lean towards privatization.  

“They want to create a crisis in our healthcare system so that if enough people are not happy with the care based on your needs, not on your ability to pay, they'll say, ‘Oh, we're ready to try anything because what we have doesn't work.’ And the solution from Ford is always the same — privatization,” she said. 

According to a March 2023 report by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario (FAO), the province allocated less than $21 billion than what would be needed to fund current health sector programs from the fiscal year 2022-23 to 2027-28. 

The lack of funding is proving to be a growing issue for people looking to enter the healthcare field. The same report by the FAO projects a shortage of 33,000 nurses and personal support workers (PSW) despite the government's attempts to increase the supply of nurses and PSWs by the fiscal year 2027-28. 

These issues extend past not only hospitals and healthcare workers but to the closure of almost half of the supervised consumption services sites (SCS) in Ontario as well. 

In a media release, the RNAO said the government will face the consequences of their actions by closing 10 SCS sites located within 200 metres of a school or child care centre. 

RNAO said these 10 SCS sites alone have prevented approximately 8,500 overdose-related deaths. These closures come at a time of overwhelming drug-related overdoses that claimed 3,800 lives last year and over 22,000 since 2018, when Ford’s government first took office. 

“We will witness more preventable deaths because the government is sending a clear message: people who use substances are disposable,” RNAO president Lhamo Dolkar said.

 “You cannot help someone after they are dead,” Dolkar said. 

Humber Et Cetera contacted the RNAO and Nurse Practitioners' Association of Ontario for further comment but has yet to receive a response.

The Ford government implemented Bill 124 in 2019, capping salary increases for healthcare professionals and other public sector workers to a one per cent increase a year for three years. 

While the bill was repealed in 2022 after the Court of Appeal for Ontario deemed it to be unconstitutional, Ontario nurses were awarded an 11.5 per cent wage increase over two years in 2023, the largest pay boost in 11 years, according to the Ontario Nurses Association. 

Peter Tabuns, Toronto-Danforth NDP MPP, said it’s important to pay healthcare workers attractive wages. 

“If you pay wages that are so low that people think or ask themselves, ‘why,’ then you're gonna lose people,” Tabuns said. “Because if you don't properly fund it, you can't actually pay the people who work in the system – and actually engage in a retention strategy that shows respect for people in the healthcare field.”  

To entice more people to return to the field and newcomers to the profession, “you start at the beginning with properly funding the healthcare system in Ontario,” he said.

While the groundwork has been laid for the proper steps for healthcare workers, pressures on the government to fix these issues continue to persist, Gélinas said. 

“People realize that what has happened is wrong and what they are doing is wrong to people who provide a good service and can help immediately,” she said. “Now that they have started to speak up, there will be a ton of pressure on the government to do the right thing.” 

“We could help thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of them tomorrow if only the government would fund more nurse practitioners and physicians,” Gélinas said.  

The province announced in a media release today that nurse practitioners and registered nurses will be able to order more tests and provide additional services to people starting July next year.

The expanded scope builds on the government’s funding of more than $500 million in an attempt to educate new nurses, provide current ones with specialized skills on the job and allow internationally educated nurses to register to work in Ontario faster and start caring for Ontarians sooner.