Ontario’s new Health Minister promises more long term care beds for Hamilton

The new Health Minister was in Hamilton Friday to announce that the province will fund 128 new long term care beds, but those beds won’t open immediately. The funding will go to Baywoods Place, a long term care facility in the city when it builds a new home in the next couple of years.

The Health Minister offering nothing today to immediately help the over crowding crisis at hospitals. They’ve been operating over capacity since 2016 which continues to cause an ambulance shortage. The bed shortage causes off load delays for paramedics, which means ambulances are lined up outside hospitals leaving the city with only one or no ambulances at all to respond to emergencies, known as a code zero. There were 21 code zeros last month and 32 in January, the worst it’s been in 5 years.

“I totally understand the issues here in Hamilton as I have learned on day four. It is a situation we are going to be working even more intensely on over the next few weeks as we prepare our budget.” Helena Jaczek, Health Minister.

The director of emergency services at St. Joe’s says today’s announcement is good news, but it’s not enough to fix this problem.

“Moving in the right direction but there’s lots of needs. We have 80 patients right now that are waiting for other settings in the community so this will help with 28 of them that are waiting for long term care.” Donna Johnson.

Hamilton Health Sciences has 164 patients who are occupying hospitals beds who don’t need to be as they wait for other care options. 24 of which are waiting for long term care beds. These hospitals are relying on hallways and other unconventional spaces like sunrooms and recovery rooms to handle the overflow. Hamilton Health Sciences says one day they had almost 100 patients in these unfunded beds.

The province has added 70 new beds in Hamilton since the fall but it’s still not enough. The Health Minister today promising in the budget there will be improvement across the entire health care system. We will have to wait and see what that means specifically for Hamilton.