Medical association's idea to fix backlogged healthcare could benefit the north

The Ontario Medical Association (OMA) is calling for immediate action from the provincial government to address millions of backlogged healthcare services.

A recent report from the association found the province's healthcare system is behind on more than one million surgeries and at least 21 million patient services, including cancer screenings and MRIs.

The association's president, Dr. Adam Kassam, said the urgent needs are funding and workers to make headway on the backlog, which he said has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

The long-term solution, Kassam said, is taking some non-emergency surgeries and services out of hospitals and into dedicated ambulatory care centres that could process and provide those services more efficiently.

With regional hospitals in northern Ontario dealing with large waitlists, he said these facilities would benefit the region and the rest of the province. It would need to be an integrated system between hospitals, family doctors, medical institutions and ambulatory care.

"When you think about tertiary academic centres — and we have a couple of those in the north — partnering with these institutions, along with the hospitals that exist, and to develop a framework, that will ... have a significant impact on care delivery in these parts of the province, which cannot go on neglected like they have been," Kassam said.

He spoke on the shortage of health workers in the region and of the OMA's ongoing talks with the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) to try and tackle that issue.

Part of that solution includes introducing more incentives for doctors and nurses to move to the north, create more residency opportunities for NOSM medical students to practise in the region and to find ways to attract more people into the medical field.

Meanwhile, Health Sciences North in Sudbury told CTV it currently has around 5,100 surgeries waitlisted, up from 3,500 pre-pandemic.

Hospitals are now able to gradually resume non-urgent and non-emergency surgeries, which were paused last month due to spikes in COVID hospitalizations.

Though with those hospitalizations now declining, along with further loosening of restrictions and plans to scrap the vaccine passport requirement, Kassam said it is unclear whether this will lead to more strain on the healthcare system.

He said what the system does need right now is funding to jumpstart capacity, including more staffing.

"Which would include an expansion of operating room hours, but measured with the understanding that health human resources tends to be a limiting step there, especially as a result of ... burnout, exhaustion," Kassam said.