April 24, 2023
Will the government properly fund Stevenson Memorial Hospital?
France Gélinas, MPP for Nickel Belt, asked the Minister of Health whether the government will give the necessary funding to Stevenson Memorial Hospital to ensure that they do not have to lay off nurses.
“Speaker, as our province’s healthcare system continues to face staffing shortages and patients are seeing record wait times, more than a dozen nurses are being laid off at Stevenson Memorial Hospital. Can the Minister of Health explain what led this hospital to have to lay off 13 nurses?”
In November of 2022, the ONA stated that Ontario has at least 24,000 nurses fewer than the Canadian average.
“While most healthcare settings are desperately hiring nurses, Stevenson Memorial Hospital is laying off nurses because they are facing a deficit because the government does not fund them enough. We all know where those nurses will end up… working for big, for-profit corporations receiving hundreds of millions of dollars diverted from the public healthcare system to private profits.
Will this Government allocate the funds to Stevenson Memorial Hospital for the nurses that their patients need and deserve?”
This legislature’s own Financial Accountability Officer projected last month that we will be short 33,000 nurses and personal support workers by 2028.