Hospital Professionals’ members to budget committee: stop the cuts!
On February 2, the OPSEU Hospital Professionals Executive made a submission to the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs on behalf of all members who work in the hospital professionals sector. Hospital professionals are key players in maximizing patient recovery, and when their services are cut the entire system is weakened. In our brief, we told the committee that hospitals face impossible decisions in deciding which hospital service will be cut, to the detriment of all Ontarians. Hospital funding must be restored to improve services levels and meet population needs.
The submission recommends that the government:
- Stop the implementation of cuts and program closures on the sole basis of cost cutting. Healthcare policies must be motivated by more than “doing more with less.” Patients that are discharged too soon return to hospital for longer stays and cost us more for healthcare.
- Restore bed capacity to meet local needs, increase the number of acute care hospital beds, and create more long-term and chronic care beds within the hospital and/or in the community.
- Expand in-patient and out-patient physiotherapy services across all hospitals in Ontario. The demand is exceeding the service and the consensus is that greater access to physiotherapy reduces time spent in hospital.
- Bring privatized lab testing and diagnostic testing (lab x-ray nuclear medicine, MRI) back into our hospitals as a public service. The benefits of providing more immediate results to physicians, quality inspection control, and reducing patient travel far outweigh the fictional savings that have produced a private parallel system that is actually costing Ontarians more.
- Stop the growth of Independent Health Facilities. These facilities charge user fees, provide inappropriate testing and ultimately are financially unaccountable as private companies operating in a public health care system.