Hospital unions say 300 new beds, 3,000 new staff needed in London hospitals

The union that represents thousands of hospital workers in Ontario is critical of the province's plan to fund London hospitals, saying the system is already pushed to the brink.

At a news conference in London Friday, one of several being held across the region, the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU) said 343 new beds are needed in the city, plus an additional 3,094 new staff over the next four years.

"This would allow us to deal with the current crisis and actually move things to a point where we would see an improvement in the quality of care. In particular, hallway medicine and long wait times," said Michael Hurley, the president of OCHU.

Southwestern Ontario has seen hospital emergency room closed again this summer due to a lack of staff. On Friday, the wait time to access emergency care at Victoria Hospital was approximately six hours. It was seven hours at University Hospital. 

Ontario's Ministry of Health is planning to make changes to alleviate pressures, having committed to opening 3,000 new beds across the province over the next decade, said spokesperson Hannah Jensen in an email Friday.

"This includes approval for London Health Science Centre (LHSC) and St. Joe's Health Care London to plan for facilities developments that will ensure patients in London can continue to connect to the care they need," Jensen wrote.

She said there are also new programs to make it easier for internationally educated, retired and out of province nurses to join the workforce.

They have also started a grant earlier this year to pay the tuition of nurses, medical laboratory technicians and paramedics, if they agree to work in Ontario after graduation.

But the unions representing healthcare workers say it won't be enough. A new report released by CUPE said the government's plans amount to a less than 1 per cent projected increase in both staffing and capacity across the province, falling short of the 22 per cent they said is needed.

Hurley said the population is aging and hospitals like London will feel the strain of patients from rural areas seeking care for complex needs.

"As people find their local hospital ER's less and less reliable in places like St. Marys, they're going to gravitate to places like London," he said.

LHSC hires between 150 to 250 new team members each month and has a wellness strategy to keep the staff they've already onboarded from quitting, the hospital said in a statement Friday.

The hospital has added a unit for patients waiting for a long term care bed and another for patients expected to be discharged within 24 hours to help quickly move patients through the system, officials added. 

Too many patients, not enough nurses

The CUPE report also says that hospital staffing levels have only increased by 0.4 per cent annually since 2020. Jensen says the government has added 63,000 nurses to the workforce since 2018.

Hurley suggests the most important change Ontario could make is to introduce a nurse-to-patient ratio within hospitals, something British Columbia has already done. It would require a minimum number of nurses assigned to each patient.

"There are so few nurses and the workloads are so intense. There are so many patients that nurses feel like they're failing them and they feel like they just can't do it anymore," Hurley said.

"The government needs to make a commitment to this. Other places like California have done it, other jurisdictions in North America have done it and where they've done it, you see remarkable improvement in nursing."