'We need certainty,' says Premier Doug Ford in response to proposed health-care deal
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said his government is "confident" a deal is forthcoming following the federal government's proposal to spend $196.1 billion on health care over the next decade.
"We're grateful for the offer, we are grateful for sitting down with the prime minister but we want sustainability, we need certainty moving forward, not just for a few years, five or 10 years, but decades to come," Ford told reporters at Queen's Park Wednesday morning.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the plan, which would see the provinces and territories get an unconditional $2-billion extra in the Canada Health Transfer (CHT) intended to relieve "immediate pressure on the health-care system, especially in pediatric hospitals, emergency rooms and surgical and diagnostic backlogs."
That number was not quite the $28 billion a year CHT increase the premiers had been asking for.
Ford said he intends to review the deal with his fellow premiers, and a spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones said a meeting has been scheduled for Ford and Jones on Thursday with federal intergovernmental affairs minister Dominic LeBlanc and federal health minister Jean-Yves Duclos.
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"Frankly, I was a little surprised that there wasn't more focus on community care and home care," Jones said Wednesday, during an announcement on home care spending.
"To me, it is a very natural place for the patient experience to be improved and enhanced."
Federal cash needed for team-based care, says doctor
Dr. Danielle Martin, chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, told CBC Radio's Metro Morning that about a third of Ontarians have access to a model where doctors work in groups with nurses, pharmacists and other health-care providers.
"It's a team-based model much more effective at allowing people to get rapid access as opposed to a single-provider model, and it costs money."
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Ontario recently announced $30 million in new funding for the creation of health teams. Martin says that money would add about 18 new teams to the existing system.
"We're going to need a lot more than that, probably at least 10 times more," she said.
On top of that, the distribution of teams across Ontario is uneven, says Martin. In Toronto, some neighbourhoods have access to several team-based care options. Scarborough, however, has almost none, she says.
That's why, Martin says, the new federal funding needs to go toward bridging the gap to ensure all Ontarians have access to the same model of care.
Former health minister calls proposal 'underwhelming'
Dr. Jane Philpott, who was the federal health minister the last time a deal was brokered with the provinces, called Trudeau's proposal "underwhelming" and "not actually what Canadians have been waiting for."
"Canadians have been waiting for some kind of vision, some kind of imagination of how our health-care system could be better," said Philpott, currently the dean of the faculty of health sciences and director of the school of medicine at Queen's University.
"Many of us on the front lines of care have been saying for a very long time that we have to fix some of the fundamental ways that our systems are designed," she told CBC's Metro Morning.
"One of the loudest conversations in recent months is that there are now 6.5 million Canadians who don't have a doctor or any other family care provider."
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The federal proposal also includes $25 billion in targeted funding for family doctors, mental health, surgical backlogs and health data systems.
Negotiations over a new health-care deal for the provinces have dragged on for two years. The premiers had insisted no strings be attached to any new money. But Ford relented on that stance last month, saying the province would commit to sharing health data and outcomes for a national database, something the federal government wanted.
On Tuesday, Ontario's fiscal watchdog said the province has a $5-billion funding shortfall in health-care, but a large contingency fund of billions of dollars that could cover that amount if they chose to do so.
