An Ontario Health Coalition report says operating rooms and diagnostic equipment are being underused in city hospitals like Ottawa.

Operating rooms and diagnostic equipment in Ottawa’s hospitals are being underused while the province sends millions of dollars to private clinics, a new report claims.

The Ontario Health Coalition report takes aim at the provincial government’s shift in recent years to fund private surgical and diagnostic clinics instead of keeping that money in the public hospital system amid a growing backlog of patients awaiting treatment.

“Local public hospitals already have the facilities: operating rooms and MRIs are sitting unused in local public hospitals because they are not given adequate funding to run them full time,” says the report, written by the health coalition’s executive director, Natalie Mehra.

“Furthermore, the evidence is that the for-profit clinics have not reduced wait times for the majority, serving mostly a minority of high-income people while actually lengthening waits for the majority of patients.”

The Ontario government said last year it would pay $155 million to private businesses to open 57 MRI, CT and endoscopy clinics. It’s part of a growing movement by the province to privatize certain medical procedures, including endoscopic, cataract, and orthopedic surgeries, in an effort to reduce wait times.

Several clinics in Ottawa have been licensed to perform these surgeries in recent years, including the Herzig Eye Institute, Focus Eye Centre and the Academic Orthopaedic Surgical Associates of Ottawa, a private, stand-alone surgical centre that originated at The Ottawa Hospital.

The coalition said Premier Doug Ford opened the doors to private surgeries and diagnostic scans when he took office, a move his government claimed would help address wait times. But it led to less funding and fewer operating hours for public hospitals, the report said.

In Ottawa, they compiled data that showed the city has at least 10 MRI machines across its network of hospitals. Most of them close overnight — one at 3 p.m. — and shut down on weekends. City hospitals also have dozens of operating rooms, most of which close by 5 p.m. and on weekends, the report said.

If given the proper funding, hospitals could expand their hours of operation and perform the procedures being done at private clinics for far less money, it adds.

Kevin Skerrett, a researcher and executive at the Ottawa Health Coalition, said the move was part of an overall strategy of the provincial government to create a private health-care system.

“What we’ve seen is a systematic bias against properly maintaining and funding our public health-care system and our public hospital system in favour of funding and supporting and encouraging the emergence of health care as a private business,” Skerrett said.

The move toward privatization ramped up in 2021, the report said, when the province began allowing private clinics to provide some of Ontario’s core public hospital services, including surgeries and diagnostic imaging.

Over the next five years, the government increased public funding and resources to establish new private clinics and bolster existing ones, citing a need to lower wait times. But wait times haven’t gone down, the coalition said, and in some cases people are paying out of pocket for medically necessary treatments and being upsold on procedures they may not need.

“I think (the Ford government has) an ideological preference for health care as a business, so they fund private health-care provisions and starve our public hospital system.”

The Ontario government refuted the claims in the report. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health called the health coalition’s claims “entirely misguided.”

“Ontario is proud to have one of the largest publicly funded health-care systems in the world, investing a record $101 billion this year alone, a 64 per cent increase from 2018, to connect more people to the care they need when they need it,” spokesperson Lily Barnes said in a statement.

She said the government had increased funding for the hospital sector by a four per cent this year, for the third year in a row.

“This is in addition to the over $60 billion we are investing to get shovels in the ground for over 60 hospital development projects, that will add 3,000 new hospital beds across the province, the 50 new MRI and CT machines we have added in hospitals, the 20,000 new doctors and 100,000 new nurses we added since 2018, the support we have given to hospitals to reduce surgical backlogs increasing of publicly funded, same-day hip and knee surgeries by 4,260 per cent and 5,840 per cent respectively and, the $3.4 billion we are investing to connect every person to primary care by 2029.”

The coalition said that, while the private clinics were being given hundreds of millions of dollars in public money, local public hospitals had been funded at less than the rate of inflation and population growth, which they described as “real-dollar cuts.”

“Our argument is, many of these problems of wait-lists and shortages and personnel and staffing shortages could be addressed by simply funding our system at the average level,” Skerrett said.

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