Auditor General’s report
Posted Dec 6, 2010 02:46:03 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Ontario’s auditor general says hospitals aren’t discharging patients on time and still face overcrowding and delays in their emergency departments.
Watchdog Jim McCarter says more than 50,000 patients stayed in hospital longer than necessary last year because their ongoing care couldn’t be arranged.
And he found that those patients are taking up much-needed beds that could help alleviate the long waits in hospital ERs.
McCarter found that many emergency departments still aren’t meeting the province’s targets for wait times despite $200 million in extra funding over two years.
Emergency patients who needed to be admitted to hospital waited an average of 10 hours for a bed, while others waited 26 hours or more.
McCarter also looked at how billions in stimulus cash was spent, saying half the funds went to a small number of big projects that, in most cases, weren’t shovel ready and weren’t vetted properly by the government.
