Some Ontario residents will undergo hip and knee surgeries at private clinics under a $115 million expansion announced by Health Minister Sylvia Jones this week. Read MoreSome Ontario residents will undergo hip and knee surgeries at private clinics under a $115 million expansion.
Some Ontario residents will undergo hip and knee surgeries at private clinics under a $115 million expansion.
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Some Ontario residents will undergo hip and knee surgeries at private clinics under a $115 million expansion announced by Health Minister Sylvia Jones this week.
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Jones said the move will add up to 20,000 OHIP-covered orthopedic surgeries and reduce wait times. The province issued a call for applications in what is being called a significant shift toward more privatization of health care across the province.
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The long-promised move to creating standalone surgical facilities for orthopedic surgeries in Ontario has been promoted as a means of reducing wait times and taking pressure off hospitals. But critics note that many hospital operating rooms sit empty much of the time. With more funding, they could do more surgeries. Meanwhile, research from Alberta suggests a similar shift in provincial health dollars to private surgery operators has undermined the public health system, increased wait times for some key surgeries and increased health-care costs.
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The Evening Citizen
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At least one of the community surgical centres will likely be located in Ottawa. In 2023, the Ottawa Hospital formed a partnership with a group of orthopedic surgeons known as the Academic Orthopedic Surgical Associates of Ottawa. The group, known as AOAO, has been renting vacant operating room space at Riverside Hospital and performing orthopedic day surgeries on low-acuity patients on weekends.
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At the time, TOH President and CEO Cameron Love said the hospital planned to work with AOAO and the province to build a private, standalone surgical centre that would function as The Ottawa Hospital’s “high efficiency” orthopedic centre for patients requiring day surgery, leaving more complex cases for hospital operating rooms. He said the proposed facility would operate full time, in contrast to the weekend surgeries currently performed at Riverside. New rules around private surgical centres appear to prohibit groups from renting existing hospital space.
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The plan for stand-alone orthopedic surgical centres comes a week after Jones announced a $155 million investment to add 57 surgical and diagnostic centres for MRIs, CT scans and GI endoscopy services, which provincial officials said would connect 1.2 million people to the services. The province has said it will announce the locations of those facilities in the coming weeks.
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