In a commentary with Excalibur, the student-run community newspaper of York University, Co-Director Mathieu Poirier, provided his opinions on how shifting backlog surgeries to for-profit clinics could affect Ontario’s healthcare system. “There’s much more we should be doing to clear surgical backlogs and fix staff shortages, but proposals to offload surgeries to for-profit clinics divert attention away from reforms needed to address this issue.
“For-profit healthcare delivery has been repeatedly demonstrated to be less equitable and less efficient than public and non-profit delivery,” Poirier added.. “This is because of the inescapable fact that for-profit care requires a portion of public funding be diverted away from care and towards private profit.”
Co-Director Poirier also highlighted that these inequities may affect not only patients but also employees. “If care providers become incentivized to work in these private clinics, we risk exacerbating existing inequities and seeing reduced service capacity in the public and non-profit hospital systems,” he explains. Healthcare workers must be paid living salaries and given raises, the latter is not helped by Bill 124, which caps salary increases at 1%.
Dr. Poirier stressed how equity and sustainability must be central to this approach’s design and implementation. “A more distributed model of surgical and outpatient care is not a bad idea, but it should be integrated with our hospital system and safeguards to protect the system-wide equity and sustainability must be central to its design and implementation.”
Read the full news article: Surgeries in For-Profit Clinics: Could There be Resulting Inequities?
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