Why do Ontario hospitals spend so much money on nurses?
Lack of staffing is costing the provincial budget dearly.
A new report from Ontario's auditor general has found that some hospitals in the province more than tripled their spending on nurses from private staffing agencies over the past year. Hospitals are filling staffing gaps by hiring nurses from agencies at significantly higher hourly rates than they pay full-time nurses.
The auditor believes this is because neither the federal Ministry of Health nor the Ontario Ministry of Health (which coordinates hospital funding) specifically tracks personnel costs.
How common is this practice?
The report shows that nurses from private staffing agencies will collectively work more than 1.7 million hours in Ontario's public hospitals between 2022 and 2023. And that's double the previous billing period.
The auditor estimated that the hiring of such private nurses has tripled in some hospitals. And in some cases, the increase is shocking. In northern Ontario hospitals, for example, agency nurses worked for 15,000 hours in 2018-19, and in 2022-23, that figure rose to 391,000 hours. And that's as much as 25 times more!
How much is that in dollars?
The report also cites the wage forks that hospitals offer to staffing agencies. In southern Ontario, rates range from CA$ 99 to CA$ 106 per hour for a registered nurse to work in the emergency department. And hospitals in northern Ontario pay between CA$ 100 and CA$ 160 per hour.
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