Stavropoulos said the auditing of Northern Ontario hospitals in 2023 found significant use of agency nurses extending beyond those needed in emergency rooms. The concern has been expressed many times in the past year by groups such as the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario and by Nickel Belt MPP France Gélinas, who is the NDP's official opposition health critic. Agency nurses are fully qualified Registered Nurses employed by contract nursing companies that hire out their nurses at higher-than-normal hourly rates to hospitals and long-term care homes. The hiring of agency nurses to offset the shortage of nursing staff was also discussed at length in the Auditor's report. North Bay's hospital was at 2.8 hours, Sault was 2.6 hours and Timmins was 1.2 hours. Sudbury's Health Science North (Ramsey Lake Health Centre) was at the halfway point with 2.1 hours. The chart showed the best time being recorded by the South Grey Bruce Health Centre (Durham) at 0.6 hours (36 minutes), to the worst time reported by Windsor Regional Hospital (Metropolitan campus) at 4.1 hours. The report included a breakdown of the time lag from when a patient reported in at the emergency room to when that patient was seen by a physician. Marie, Sudbury, Thunder Bay and Timmins-received about two-thirds of specialist locum coverage days.” The specialties requiring the most locum days in Northern Ontario were internal psychiatry, general surgery, internal medicine, and anaesthesia,” said the report. The report also touched on the specialties that locum physicians provided in the North. "Ontario Health informed us that due to an overall shortage of emergency department physicians, the Locum Program prioritizes hospitals with the most urgent needs, and considers requests from hospitals in Northern communities before those in the south," said the report. The report further stated that hospitals requested more than 96.000 hours of support from the Locum Program, but the program was only able to cover 60,000 hours. That has forced hospitals to rely on the Locum Program to fill longer-term physician vacancies even though the program was intended to be used as a temporary measure," said the report. "We found that a primary reason for their increased use of the Locum Program has been higher rates of local physicians retiring or leaving the community in the last couple of years. "While the sickest patients can access and receive emergency department care on a timely basis, more needs to be done to address the risks associated with long wait times and increasing patient length of stay," the report stated.Ī key item addressed in the report was the frequent use of Locums (travelling temporary doctors) called on to fill in, especially at smaller hospitals in Northern Ontario. Ontario's acting auditor general Nick Stavropoulos presented a value-for-money spending audit to the Ontario government this week and confirmed what Northerners have been hearing for many months - Northern Ontario health clinics and hospitals are stretched to the limits in terms of being able to provide timely emergency room care and that there is a serious shortage of doctors and nurses.
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