Doctor shortage closes West End Clinic urgent care twice over holidays
Urgent care at the West End Clinic will be shut down Christmas Day and New Year's Day due to physician shortages.
The closure will also allow Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) to redeploy staff to shore up hospital emergency rooms on Christmas Day and New Year's Day.
In addition, the pediatric flu, COVID-19 and cold clinic at McMaster Children's Hospital will close on these days.
What will happen is the urgent care load of patients will end up at emerg and those patients will wait a super long time," said Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition. The issue that is hitting in Hamilton so badly and elsewhere across the province - that there just aren't enough staff - remains completely unsolved."
HHS has more than 1,400 job openings - of those about 700 are nursing positions. To compare, HHS had 750 unfilled jobs in September 2021.
This is a workforce which is exhausted and from all of the polling that we've done is feeling that they are not supported or respected and is leaving in large numbers." said Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, which is part of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).
We've got a huge number of vacancies in Hamilton and also provincially. We're having great difficulty recruiting people to come to work to replace the people who are leaving."
This is the second time this year that HHS has had to close urgent care due to gaps in staffing. The clinic at 690 Main St W was shut down for roughly eight weeks in January.
The situation is not new and it's unfortunate," said Sandy Shaw, MPP for Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas and a member of the NDP. Hospitals, I believe, are doing what they have to do to make it work but are being failed by the provincial government."
The Ministry of Health said in a statement that it has launched the largest health-care recruiting and training initiative in the province's history."
So far this year, our government is investing in a range of initiatives to attract, train and retain more nurses, and get them into the system sooner," stated the ministry. On top of that ... we are breaking down registration barriers so more health care professionals trained in Ontario, in other provinces or internationally can practice."
But so far, it hasn't stopped temporary closures across the province, including Norfolk General Hospital shutting down its emergency department for 24 hours in October.
All of the various closures this year is like nothing we have ever seen before," said Mehra. I have never seen so little action in the face of a crisis from the government ... There's so much that they could be doing that would make a difference right now and they're just not doing it. We are staggered by this. It's just inexplicable to us."
CUPE estimates the province needs to attract 47,100 hospital staff over the next three years to maintain services. Hamilton hospitals alone need to hire 3,200 more staff a year.
In addition, Hurley says the attrition rate has reached about 15 per cent when it should be under five per cent. CUPE says hospital vacancies are up to nearly six per cent from under two per cent six years ago.
Unfortunately, we've yet to see the government produce any substantial plan ... and this is incomprehensible," said Hurley. If we want to retain people than we have to give them a working environment where they can go home and not feel like they have let people down."
Joanna Frketich is a health reporter at The Spectator. jfrketich@thespec.com