Quote:
A new auditor's report finds that hospitals are filling staffing gaps by hiring agency nurses at significantly higher hourly rates than they pay the nurses they directly employ.
The report found some hospitals that more than tripled their spending on agency nurses in the course of just one year, from 2021-22 to 2022-23, while hospitals in northern Ontario saw a 25-fold increase in their use of agency nurses over a four-year stretch.
The trend "has put financial pressures on hospitals," says the report.
"There's a big dependence on agency nurses," acting auditor general Nick Stavropolous told a news conference Wednesday.
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Quote:
The report also cites ranges for how much hospitals pay the staffing agencies: $99 to $106 an hour for a registered nurse to work in the emergency department of a hospital in southern Ontario, while hospitals in northern Ontario pay anywhere from $100 to $160 an hour.
If you take the bottom end of those ranges, and multiply it by the hours worked, Ontario hospitals spent at least $170 million on agency nurses last year.
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toron...050828?cmp=rss
Ah, always nice to see how we can sprinkle some private healthcare services in to save money...
This makes so little sense to me. If you constantly have a nursing shortage, which we seem to, why not hire them into the system? You aren't going to end up hiring too many. How does it make sense to shovel tax dollars to private companies providing exactly the same thing we could get by hiring them directly? But ya, we shoudl probably do more of this, right?