ONA Provincial President Erin Ariss, RN Credit: ONA
During Mike Harris’ tenure as premier (1995 -2002), universal public healthcare in Ontario was under attack. In fact, Harris fired more than 10,000 nurses, comparing them to hula hoop workers who lost their jobs after hula hoops became an outdated fad. For registered nurses that meant dramatically increased workloads; violence in the workplace on a daily basis; and nurses feeling burned out as employers make impossible demands.
Under Ford, nurses have seen their standard of living eroded by policies like Ford’s Bill 124 (2019) limiting public employees to increases of one per cent. After a determined fight by the nurses’ union and other labour organizations, Bill 124 was deemed unconstitutional in November 2022, but only repealed by the Ontario government in February 2024.
Meanwhile, the Ontario government continues under funding the healthcare system while making no meaningful effort to deal with the severe shortage of registered nurses and healthcare professionals.
Instead, the Ford government is hell-bent on driving healthcare towards full privatization.
These challenges prompted emergency room (ER) nurse, Erin Ariss, to successfully run to become the Ontario Nurses Association (ONA) President after serving as Region 4 Vice-President.
Today, Erin and I discuss the disruption of medical supplies for home care patients that began September 24, 2024.
But let’s go back a bit further to 2023 when the Ford government passed legislation creating the publicly funded Ontario Health atHome service that was meant to coordinate in-home and community-based care for 650,000 patients a year.
Ontario Health atHome has a mission of, “helping everyone to be healthier at home through connected, accessible, patient-centred care;” a vision to provide, “exceptional care – where ever you call home;” while valuing collaboration, respect, integrity and excellence. However, it’s clear that major stakeholders like doctors, nurses, caregivers and patients were not consulted during the planning or implementation of the transition to new suppliers which created life threatening situations for patients and nightmare scenarios for care providers across the province.
As of September 24, 2024, home care recipients — including palliative care patients — were impacted by medication and medical supply shortages including antibiotics, sedatives, pain pumps, ostomy bags and hydration supplies. Some equipment not only arrived late, but had missing parts.
Some folks became so desperate they headed to the nearest emergency room to get supplies, ordered from Amazon where product quality is not always assured and even called 911 to have a family member admitted to hospital when supplies didn’t arrive.
Compounding the supply problem were delivery issues because Ontario Health atHome also made wide sweeping changes to the delivery system. Originally, a total of 14 delivery zones based on local health integration networks (LHINs) were covered by one organization contracted to fulfill orders for medical supplies and infusion medicine using local suppliers. That meant emergency supplies could be delivered within a window of four hours and up until midnight.
Instead, Ontario Health atHome decided to award contracts to Bayshore Specialty Rx, OMS, Shoppers Drug Mart and Robinsons to deliver medical supplies to districts that cover much larger delivery zones. Calea was contracted to deliver infusion medicine to parts of Ontario.
Larger service areas mean that it can take 48 hours to get supplies to home care patients that were previously delivered within four hours.
Erin Ariss helps listeners understand why the Ford government created Ontario Health atHome; what went so terribly wrong and how this led to another Ford manufactured healthcare crisis even though privatizing healthcare — including home care — was never part of Ford’s mandate.
A toll-free Medical Supplies Escalation Line has been set up for patients with unresolved issues at 1-866-377-7567.
Residents who paid for additional supplies can go to ontariohealthathome.ca/refund to fill out the medical reimbursement form and email it to: refund@ontariohealthathome.ca
Thanks to everyone who read today’s article and listened to my podcast. With your continued support, a little Nicoll can make a lot of change.
Music: Real Estate by UNIVERSFIELD is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License. freemusicarchive.org.
*Be sure to download the Substack app to get the most from your podcast experience.
Share this post