Cuts at Ottawa Hospital will hurt patients, nurses' union warns

The Ottawa Hospital is one of the largest employers in the National Capital Region with more than 13,000 employees at its General, Civic and Riverside campuses. Nurses make up more than one-third of its total workforce. Photo by Ashley Fraser /Postmedia

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Cutting hundreds of front-line nursing positions at The Ottawa Hospital will have a severe impact on patient care, the head of the Ontario Nurses’ Association is warning.

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“The breadth of these cuts is incredibly worrisome. Eliminating front-line staff is not just trimming a budget, it’s dismantling the backbone of patient care,” said Erin Ariss, provincial president of the union that represents nurses in Ontario.

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The Ottawa Hospital announced in early April that it will cut three per cent of its workforce after other cost-savings efforts failed to produce the results it needed.

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That three per cent translates to about 400 jobs, several hundred of them frontline health workers, mainly nurses. The hospital, which is the largest in Eastern Ontario, says it is doing everything possible to protect jobs and access to services “while we continue providing excellent care to our community.”

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But unions and health organizations have said the cuts will hurt patient care and provincial funding that is inadequate to meet population and demand is the problem.

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Ariss added her voice to those concerns, especially when it comes to the work done by nurses, who make up the largest proportion of hospital staffing. In a statement, she also took aim at provincial funding.

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“It is absurd that in a province like Ontario, which already has the worst nurse-to-population ratio in all of Canada, a hospital is targeting nurses to make up for underfunding of the public health-care system by the Ford government,” she said.

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“Nurses have borne the brunt of inadequate funding for decades, suffering round after round of cuts, even as mounting evidence shows us that we should be increasing RN (registered nurse) staffing.”

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She warned the cuts would lead to “longer wait times, increased burnout and risks to patient safety.”

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The hospital is the latest in Ontario to announce job cuts, including cuts to nursing staff. The Ontario Hospital Association has warned there is a growing funding gap which has left hospitals across the province with deficits and many with bank loans.

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The Ontario government committed to increasing hospital funding by $1.1 billion in its latest budget but the OHA has warned that, while welcomed, that will not be enough to cover inflationary and other pressures and hospitals will have tough decisions to make. Many of those decisions are now rolling out in the form of staffing cuts.

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Unions note that hospitals, including TOH, are already overwhelmed by high patient volumes and long wait times due to staffing and capacity shortages.

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