March 7, 2023
Bill 60’s schedule 2 more than concerning
This morning in the Queen’s Park Media Studio MPP France Gélinas and the Executive Director of the Ontario Health Coalition spoke with reporters about their concerns with Schedule 2 of Bill 60; the Ford government’s bill to move surgeries into corporate controlled for-profit surgical suites.
“Currently the titles of physician, nurse, registered practical nurse, respiratory therapist, laboratory technician are all protected titles for health professionals that are supervised by a health college. The college ensures that the title is held by a professional with prescribed level of education, experience and is registered’’ Gélinas stated. “Schedule 2 of Bill 60 allows these titles to be used by people who are not registered members of a regulatory health college.”
Schedule 2 of Bill 60 states “physician” means a legally qualified medical practitioner who is lawfully entitled to practice medicine in Ontario or another prescribed person. The government has yet to release any draft regulations that would indicate who that another prescribed person would be. In order for people to receive quality care they need to trust that the physician or the nurse or the respiratory therapist in front of them have the knowledge and the skills of that profession.
Merha said “This legislation is already, in our opinion, horrible legislation as it brings in the privatization of core services from our public hospitals; however, there was no real need for this legislation as the government already had tools to make these changes. This schedule (2) is a shocking deregulation of a range of health care providers, from surgeons and physicians, through every class of nurses, x-ray technologist, respiratory therapists, and laboratory technologist. They’ve deregulated all those professionals and will leave it to regulations to prescribe who can call themselves a surgeon, who can call themselves a nurse and so on.”
Bill 60 has passed second reading and will be brought before the Ontario Legislature’s Social Policy Committee for public comment on March 20th and 21st.