Consultant predicts downsizing will occur over next two years.

• Author: Krejlgaard, Chris
• Position: Part 3 - Health care industry in Ontario - Industry Overview

The following is the final instalment of a three-part series which puts Ontario's health-care sector under the microscope. This month Northern Ontario Business staff writer Chris Krejlgaard examines potential solutions to the health-care crisis.

The health-care system in Ontario is changing.

Faced with less funds - or, at the very least, limited funding increases from the province - hospitals must rethink and restructure their operations. Meanwhile, the provincial Ministry of Health must re-evaluate some of its spending priorities.

Ted Ball, president of Health Concepts Consultants of Toronto, predicts that Ontario's hospital system will be massively downsized over the next two years.

The current and future financial status of the health-care sector will precipitate a total restructuring in about three years, he adds.

Ball says the need to restructure the system has been known and documented for several years, "but there was no political will to do it. Now there is no choice."

If the province does not better last year's 9.5-per-cent increase in hospital funding and if it fails to provide funds for pay equity and last spring's wage settlement for nurses it could mean that "anywhere from 3,500 to 5,000 beds may have to come out of the acute-care system, and perhaps as many as 6,000 or 7,000 jobs," according to Ball.

He predicts that between $600 million and $800 million will be slashed from hospital funding in the 1982/83 fiscal year if Provincial Treasurer Floyd Laughren maintains his projected deficit ceiling. That would mean downsizing Ontario's hospitals by $1 billion - more than 13 per cent of their total funding - during the next two years.

Can such a restructuring be accomplished?

Sure, says Ball.

Ball, who was a senior policy adviser for former health ministers Larry Grossman and Dennis Timbrell during the early 1980s, says downsizing must take community needs and the existence of community-based services into account.

"We (health-care officials) have to listen very carefully as we downsize," Ball says. "We'll make mistakes, so we'll have to make sure we can go back and correct them."

The need for co-operation includes the need for hospitals to coordinate their services and reduce duplication.

Such efforts are already under way in North Bay, Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury. In fact, North Bay Civic Hospital and St. Joseph's General Hospital of North Bay have been sharing some services and facilities for the better part of a decade.

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