“These stresses are likely to last for some time.” In a new report, the Patient Ombudsman says
A new report from the province’s watchdog for the health system says that a growing number of patient complaints are due to not enough staff in hospitals and long-term care homes.
Last year, the patient ombudsman in Ontario got more than 3,000 complaints. In the ombudsman’s annual report, it says that a lack of staff and a lack of access to care are common themes.
“The complaints we got last year showed how stressed out everyone is, both patients and care providers,” the report, which will be released Tuesday morning, says. The patient ombudsman gave CBC News a copy before it came out.
The number of patients and caregivers who said they were not treated with “sensitivity, caring, courtesy, or respect” at hospitals went up by 43 percent, according to the report.
In an interview, patient ombudsman Craig Thompson said that this rise shows that the stress that both patients and health care providers are under is affecting their personal interactions.
Thompson said, “When you look at some of the health human resource problems, you’re already asking a lot of people who have been under a lot of stress for the first two or three years of the pandemic.”
“Everyone’s ability to deal with things has gone down,” he said. “You’re going to have problems if you ask your staff to do more with less.”
Thompson says that this is especially clear in emergency rooms, where people often feel like staff aren’t telling them enough about what’s going on. He wants hospitals to make it easier for people waiting in the ER to understand what is going on.
He said, “Communication is very important.” “We can’t just let that fall down, especially now.”
Since last year, hospitals in Ontario have had trouble finding enough people to work there. Last spring, people had to wait longer to get into the emergency room. During the summer, some smaller ERs had to close because they didn’t have enough staff. In the fall, respiratory viruses caused a lot of people to go to the hospital.
The Ombudsman is telling Ontarians not to think that things will get better quickly.
The report says that the COVID-19 pandemic is still a factor that “exposes and worsens long-standing stresses on the health-care system.”
“It’s unlikely that things will get back to “normal” quickly. Instead, these stresses are likely to last for a while as efforts are made to deal with shortages of staff, long wait times, access problems, and backlogs in surgeries and other procedures.
The patient ombudsman in Ontario takes care of complaints about the quality of care in Ontario’s hospitals, long-term care homes, and home-care system that have not been resolved.
Even though the report gives specifics about some complaints, it doesn’t say which hospital or long-term care home they were about.
Thompson said, “We’re not in the business of naming names and putting people on the spot.” “We really want to help health care providers do their jobs better by giving them information and ideas based on complaints.”
Thompson says that his office is worried about how people are moved from the hospital to long-term care.
“It’s especially important for the hospitals to make sure that the process doesn’t start at the last minute,” he said. “There is a lot of information that needs to be shared. People need time to think about what to do. They need to feel like they are being helped, not forced to make decisions.”
In his report, the ombudsman talks about what he calls the aggressive behavior of hospital security.
“We’re hearing more complaints about the security staff getting in the way of patients and their families,” said Thompson. “This is something that makes us very, very worried.”
Thompson said that some hospitals don’t have the right policies for how to deal with bad interactions between security and patients.
He said that hospital management needs to do a better job of making sure security staff are well-trained, since security in a hospital is very different from security in a store like a mall.