Recently, the Ontario government announced a hundred million dollars of new funding towards a new, 288 bed nursing home in Wasaga Beach. What’s really impressive is that the project is already ready to put shovels in the ground. Construction is expected to begin in late 2026, and it’s anticipated that the first residents will be welcomed in 2029. This will become the largest nursing home in the South Georgian Bay region.
To be abundantly clear, Ontario does need more nursing home beds. In 2017, I wrote about the then desperate need to build 35,000 nursing home beds. For reasons that I can’t fathom, the previous Liberal governments never really did anything to build up healthcare infrastructure, despite the fact that we had a growing and aging population. That particular government seemed to think that the healthcare needs of the population would simply fix themselves.
I’ve been critical of some of the things that the current Conservative government has done in health care, but they do deserve credit for significantly ramping up healthcare infrastructure builds. Whether it’s new hospitals being built, new equipment like MRIs being purchased, and yes, finally building new nursing homes, this particular government has recognized that you simply can’t provide healthcare to an aging and growing population without increasing the capacity of the infrastructure.
However, I continue to be frustrated by the fact that a government whose leader is famous for having made extremely critical comments of overlapping and haphazard bureaucracy, hasn’t done more to get the various facets of the healthcare system to be streamlined and work together.
The Wasaga Beach Nursing Home (as much as it’s needed and should be built) is a perfect example of this.
Nursing homes, by definition, have complex patients with significant health care needs. Some of them, will get sick and will need to be transferred to the nearest hospital Emergency for assessment. For Wasaga Beach, this means the Collingwood General and Marine Hospital (CGMH). Being complex patients with multiple health needs, some will be admitted to hospital.
However, as of 2024/25, the CGMH already showed over 39,000 ER visits (up 8% from the year before!) Their inpatient status showed overcapacity for the entire fiscal year. All hospitals have fluctuations and times where they are more full than others, but to be overfull for an entire fiscal year is extra ordinarily busy.
How much more stress will be added to the CGMH by the new nursing home?
Trying to find reasonable data is painfully difficult. I searched a number of sites, but the best that I could come up with was a 2018 analysis. Yes, there was fluctuation during Covid, but we are back to pre-Covid numbers. Crunching a lot of numbers (so that you, dear reader, don’t have to) gives the following, what I consider to be reasonable, projections:
- The CGMH can expect about 160 ER visits per year from the new nursing home. These patients are very complex so their ER visits will take much longer. (By comparison, 288 seniors who live independently in the community would only result in 58 ER visits per year).
- Given that just under half of all nursing home patients who go to the ER wind up getting admitted to hospital, we are looking at about 75 more admissions to hospital per yer.
- It was even tougher trying to find out how long patients who are admitted to hospital from a nursing home will stay in hospital. That link above had some information, but hardly enough to be accurate. The best guess I could come up with was between 5-7 days per admission, so if we go with 6 days in hospital on average, we’re looking at about 450 days in hospital per year.
Now let’s keep in mind that the CGMH is already full. We no longer have hallway health care. We have chair health care (the hallways are full). So where are these patients going to go? (N.B. I do appreciate that there might be some relief as some of our hospitals Alternate Level of Care patients will now have a nursing home to go to – but I’m going to make an educated guess that the stress on the hospital will outweigh the benefit).
My three loyal readers might be aware of the fact that Collingwood is getting a new hospital. Once again, kudos to the current government for approving a badly needed new facility. However, there are still a bunch of bureaucratic approvals needed, and shovels won’t go into the ground until at least the fall of 2028. Hopefully, the project will be complete in 2033 (because government run projects always come in on time).
And this is the part that really drives physicians and healthcare workers crazy. Could there not be some common sense in the eyes of the bureaucrats at the ministry of health who approve these projects? If you are able to approve shovels in the ground by this fall for the nursing home, why can’t you do it for the hospital? You know that patients from the nursing home are going to wind up in hospital and stress an already overburdened place. You know that the new hospital’s been approved. Why doesn’t the Ministry of Health co-ordinate the builds? Do these bureaucrats from each department (hospital and nursing home) not talk to each other? (Having been involved in many meetings with many bureaucrats at different branches of the ministry when I was president of the Ontario Medical Association, I can tell you the answer to that is no.)
Overbureaucratization of our health care system has been a problem for decades now. It’s been unrelenting and farcical at times. The Wasaga Beach nursing home, as needed as it is, is just one more example of this. It’s where the real silos exist in health care and our system will not improve until we get a government that is willing to tackle the bureaucracy.
justanoldcountrydoctor 