Ford Government Passes Controversial Bill 7
On August 31st, the PC provincial government passed Bill 7 through the legislature. The More Beds, Better Care Act amends the Fixing Long-Term Care Act 2021 in an attempt to alleviate the nursing crisis that’s seen hospitals have to close emergency rooms across the province. The Ford government used their majority to bypass hearings and enact a very controversial piece of legislation. In essence, the updates to the Fixing Long-Term Care Act allow a placement co-ordinator, a person responsible for finding available LTC beds for patients waiting for them, to select an LTC facility and provide personal health information to the LTC facility with or without a patient’s consent.
The placement co-ordinator is also allowed to find an available LTC facility within a rather large geographic area. Geographic restrictions aren’t included in the Bill and opposition parties have speculated that in Northern Ontario, patients may be moved up to 300km away from home; in Southern Ontario, patients may be moved up to 100km away from home; and in cities, they may be moved up to 30km away from home. While the Bill does stipulate that no patient can be physically forced to transfer to an LTC facility or be physically restrained, the vague language of the Bill combined with the lack of specifics from Minister of Long-Term Care Paul Calandra and Minister of Health Sylvia Jones, it does leave open the possibility of having patients be forced to pay $1,500 or more per day for refusing to move to an available LTC facility.
While Premier Ford has pretty much guaranteed patients will not be charged such an eye-watering amount, both him and Minister Calandra have stated that they believe coercive payments under such circumstances are fair and necessary to expedite the process. Patients can already be made to pay a $62 per day co-payment if they refuse to move to an available LTC facility which is about the same amount they’d be paying while in an LTC facility. These new policies are expected to open 250 beds within 6 months and 1300 by march of 2023.
This Bill coincides with new measures green-lit by the Ministry of Health that will expedite the registration processes for internationally trained nurses and nationally trained physicians. These measures will provide a temporary registration for internationally trained nurses while they fulfill the registration process (completing education and exam) while also eliminating rules that allow for temporary certificates to be revoked after one failed exam and replacing them with rules that allow for revocation after two failed exams. The Ministry has also asked that the College of Nurses of Ontario change the rules that only allow for non-practising nurses to be reinstated if they’ve practised within three years. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario are also to create a temporary, three-month registration for physicians trained in other provinces and practice-ready assessments that would allow internationally trained physicians to be rapidly assessed over a period of 12 weeks. These measures would work to bring more bodies into the healthcare system which seems to be the main issue. The measures enacted by Bill 7 aim to solve the problem by reducing the number of patients and increasing the number of available beds; a farce if there’s no one available to attend said beds.
While the overcrowding of hospital beds by patients awaiting LTC facility openings is a real issue, the lack of details provided by Bill 7 for acting without a patient’s consent seem to shift the blame onto patients as opposed to government failures. The government has had ample opportunity to invest more in long-term care and home care, both of which would reduce the burden on the healthcare system, but instead, they’ve decided to take some fairly heavy-handed measures against elderly citizens to try and make the status quo work. We are anxiously awaiting further details from the Ford government on how exactly these measures will play out if a patient does not consent to a forced move. We sincerely hope we get them.