Health Sciences North (HSN), the largest hospital in Northern Ontario, is not able to fully utilize all its available operating rooms and staff shortages are a key reason.
HSN revealed that Wednesday while responding to a Sudbury.com news story where NDP health critic France Gélinas was speaking out against Ontario Bill 60, an effort by Ontario’s Conservative government to allow private medical clinics to do more procedures and minor surgeries.
This is designed to ease up on the backlog of surgeries in Ontario, the government argues.
But Gélinas, the MPP for Nickel Belt, counters that one of the key reasons for the backlog of surgeries is the shortage of doctors in the province, not a shortage of facilities, arguing Ontario doesn’t need additional for-profit private health care clinics to speed up the process; it just needs more staff.
"We already have the infrastructure throughout Ontario — we don't need extra infrastructure, what we need is extra staff to work in those infrastructures,” Gélinas said. “Like you can go to Health Sciences North right now, you will see there are brand new OR (Operating Room) suites that are built, and that have never been open to this day.
They've never been open, because they haven't got the money to open them."
Sudbury.com contacted HSN to verify the comments from Gélinas and the hospital confirmed that of its 17 surgical suites, only 13 are used.
"HSN currently operates 13 of its 17 surgical operating rooms," said an email from communications manager Jason Turnbull. He added that hospital staff had performed a significant number of surgeries is the past year, despite the impact of COVID-19. "Our ability to fully utilize all available operating rooms is limited by the availability of specialized staff and physicians, and bed capacity and staffing constraints on inpatient units."
Meanwhile, Turnbull said HSN continues to perform thousands of necessary procedures, despite the staff shortage.
"Thanks to the efforts of our surgical team, between April 1, 2022 and March 31, 2023 HSN completed 15,106 surgical cases, which represents 95 per cent of surgical cases completed in the same period in 2019-2020. This includes an increase in outpatient surgeries from 9,146 in 2019-2020 to 9,513 in 2022-2023," the email continued.
Len Gillis writes about health issues and also the mining industry for Sudbury.com.
