Feb. 21, 2005. 01:00 AM

905-area hospitals get short shrift
Regions receive less per capita

Institutions asking province for more

TANYA TALAGA
HEALTH POLICY REPORTER

Hospitals in the GTA/905 area are banding together to demand the McGuinty government reverse years of chronic underfunding to their institutions, to the tune of $545 million annually plus $70 million for home care.

At a meeting of mayors and regional chairs Friday, they charged that, compared with other regions in Ontario, on a per-patient basis the GTA/905 receives 30 per cent less in total health-care funding, 27 per cent less in hospital funding and 24 per cent less for home care.

"This is the gap we face and we recognize it won't be closed overnight," said Tariq Asmi, executive director of the GTA/905 Healthcare Alliance, an organization that includes 11 hospital groups in the regions and suburban Toronto, but not the major downtown hospitals. "We hope the province works to correct this funding inequity so residents of the 905 can receive care close to home."

Communities in York, Durham, Peel and Halton regions have experienced rapid growth in recent years. Hospital funding just hasn't kept up. More than 3 million people live in these four regions, Asmi said, and each year, 90,000 new people move into areas served by GTA/905 hospitals.

No funding mechanism exists to respond properly to that kind of growth, said John Oliver, president of Halton Healthcare Services.

At Halton's Oakville-Trafalgar site, other than a minor emergency-department development completed in the late 1990s, there have been no additions since the early 1990s. Meanwhile, the area's population has increased dramatically. "We've absorbed 60,000 people in Oakville since that date," Oliver said, yet "there hasn't been any major infrastructure development." Patients often must go to Toronto or Hamilton for care.

Southlake Regional Health Centre, a hospital serving people in York Region and Simcoe County — as far north, in some cases, as Muskoka — has been pushing for a new cancer centre.

Cancer Care Ontario has identified Newmarket as being an area in need of such a centre, said Dan Carriere, Southlake's CEO. Magna Corp. has donated $8 million toward the project, and the hospital has raised an additional $10 million, he said. Yet the government has made no commitment to building it.

At present, Southlake does some cancer surgeries and about 7,000 chemotherapy visits yearly, but patients needing radiation therapy must go to Sunnybrook hospital or other Toronto institutions, he said.

The 905-region hospitals offer a way for the health ministry to reduce waiting lists, Carriere said. GTA/905 Healthcare Alliance data shows that regional hospitals can provide care more cheaply than the downtown teaching hospitals. "We are a bargain," Carriere said. "The GTA hospitals are offering a solution, not a problem."

While Premier Dalton McGuinty has raised a cry about Ontario not receiving its fair share of federal spending from Ottawa, Asmi argues the same is happening here.

"Within Ontario's own borders there are communities suffering from lack of access to health care locally because of lack of funding," Asmi said. "We recognize government is trying. There is just more they can do."

On a per capita basis, GTA hospitals should have received $85 million from the Ontario government's recent $307 million increase in base hospital funding for 2004-05, he said. But the hospitals got only $37.6 million.

The GTA/905 Healthcare Alliance has met with Finance Minister Greg Sobara and members of Health Minister George Smitherman's staff.