Hospitals in smaller and rural Ontario communities have been recruiting, training, and poring over schedules in the hopes of avoiding another summer wave of temporaryER closures -- though the problem never really went away.
Staffing shortages led hospitals to close their emergency departments for hours or even days at a time during the summer of 2022.
Other temporary closures were reported in the province during the winter, and now, just as the summer season is due to arrive, there have been more than half a dozen closures in recent days -- including for 48 hours recently in Thessalon, a town in northern Ontario. In Minden, Ont., the hospital has decided to permanently close the local ER as of June 1, due to staff shortages. It saw no closures last summer, but Carolyn Plummer, president and CEO of Haliburton Highlands Health Services, said there were many close calls that would have led to short-notice temporary closures of either the Minden or Haliburton ERs -- or both.
Like Haliburton Highlands and many other hospitals across the province, the Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital has had to rely on nursing agencies to bolster staffing levels. That has left the eastern Ontario hospital with a stable staffing situation, but at a net cost of $2.8 million just last year, said president and CEO Michael Cohen.
But the situation in rural health care has been a long time coming, with successive governments failing to establish a coherent policy approach, he said. A spokesperson for the health minister highlighted a number of programs and changes aimed at bolstering staffing, including covering the cost of nursing school tuition in exchange for working in the region individuals study in, automatically letting health-care workers from other provinces practise in Ontario and removing regulatory barriers for internationally educated nurses.
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