Throughout November, members of the Hospital Professionals Division (HPD) hosted five Public Healthcare Townhalls in Ottawa, London, Windsor, Kingston, and Thunder Bay. Thank you to every member of the community, HPD, and Health Coalitions who attended!
The healthcare town halls provided an opportunity for Hospital Professionals and community members around Ontario to discuss how the healthcare staffing crisis has affected crucial diagnostic services, radiology, respiratory, social work, and community supports.
In Thunder Bay, medical laboratory technologists and technicians talked about the decline in local diagnostic testing. As a result, they have to send specimens to Toronto for testing. This causes months of delay before delivering heartbreaking cancer diagnoses; diagnoses that could have been treated if addressed promptly.
In Windsor, radiology technologists noted the rise of private for-profit CT and radiology clinics taking workers away from public delivery; all the while, testing rooms are vacant, with not enough staff to service them.
In Ottawa, we heard loud and clear from Dr Vivian Stamatopoulos about the perils of private for-profit Long-Term Care – more precarity, more expensive, more negative outcomes.
From Kingston to London and beyond, we heard stories about how privatization of public services is leading to closures, shutdowns, early retirements, and total burnout of crucial allied health professionals.
The media focuses heavily on physicians and nurses; however, those professions are only a few in a full team of healthcare providers necessary to keep our public healthcare system running.
Physicians and nurses rely on the diagnostic work and support provided by Hospital Professionals. No treatment occurs in healthcare without diagnostic services provided by allied healthcare providers.
HPD represents approximately 30,000 hospital professionals in more than 100 bargaining units across the province – more than half of which are currently participating in the central bargaining process with the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA). The HPD Central contract will expire on March 31, 2025.
