Thank you very much for the question.

I’d certainly be happy to look into this case, if you want to talk to me about it afterwards.

Nothing is more important to all of us than protecting the health and well-being of Ontarians, and especially our children.

We’re working with pediatric hospitals to ramp up their capacity wherever possible, and that means making permanent investments to increase the number of critical care beds at CHEO, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario; McMaster Children’s Hospital; London Health Sciences Centre Children’s Hospital; Hospital for Sick Children; and the Kingston Health Sciences Centre.

This government has invested almost $1 billion in the surgical recovery funding. We will continue to make the investments necessary and spare no expense to make sure that the people of this province, and especially our children, continue to have access to the quality care that they know and expect.

Thank you again to the member opposite for the question.

Obviously, this government has pulled out all the stops and is in the midst of the largest health human resources recruitment and training-retention initiative in Ontario’s history. We’ve made record investments, as the Premier noted earlier—60,000 new nurses here in Ontario, and 8,000 new doctors, including 1,800 family physicians. We are going to continue to make those investments. That’s part of the reason we brought forward Bill 60.

We’re also, in our Your Health plan, expanding family health teams. We’ve got a $30-million investment in that.

We’re doing everything we can to make sure that Ontarians get the kind of care that they know and deserve.

Thank you to the member opposite for her submissions. I know that the member opposite represents the riding of Toronto Centre, and I know lots of people who live in the riding of Toronto Centre, lots of people there who run businesses and own businesses.

I wanted to ask the member opposite if she didn’t think that there are a lot of great things in our red tape reduction package this year, the Less Red Tape, Stronger Economy Act, that will help the businesses in the member’s riding and those constituents who I’m sure want her to represent them today.

It’s my pleasure to rise in the House today to speak to Bill 60, and I’d like to thank my fellow parliamentary assistant, the member for Newmarket–Aurora, for leading off the debate and for a great speech, which I think went over a lot of the important ground on Bill 60.

As a member of the Standing Committee on Social Policy, I’m here to confirm that the committee heard from over 40 presenters who provided their feedback on Bill 60 over the course of three days of public hearings. We heard from Dr. John Yip, president and CEO of SE Health, who said, “Based on SE Health’s knowledge of the national landscape, I’m here to say that Bill 60 is a good start in eliminating Ontario’s surgical backlogs. We are pleased to see this government introduce significant changes to our system that will better serve Ontarians within a publicly funded system. Overall, this bill sets up a good framework to create a system of surgical care that is patient-centred and promotes patient choice.”

The president of the Ontario Medical Association, Dr. Rose Zacharias said, “We support Bill 60 and its feature to move lower acuity surgeries and procedures out of hospitals. This is an important step in reducing wait times....

“I think what we want to emphasize is that every medical necessary service would be covered by OHIP and no one would be paying out of pocket to jump first in line.”

And Dr. Agarwal, a radiologist who currently runs a clinic with other radiologists, shared with the committee this: “I come to you today in support of Bill 60 as it applies to diagnostic imaging and moving CT and MRI” scans “from our public hospitals into outpatient centres. I believe that this proposal, if implemented correctly, will decrease our wait-lists, increase access to these important medical examinations, and alleviate the bottleneck that has been crippling our health care system.

“Just a little bit of background: MRI and CT scans, when they’re ordered by your physicians, should be completed within 28 days. What we see in Ontario is that these scans are completed between three months and 12 months later.” That’s what Dr. Agarwal said.

And Speaker, that is exactly why our government is supporting moving forward with Bill 60 so we can clear the backlog and ensure that patients in Ontario are getting the care they need when they need it.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, our government has invested almost a billion dollars—$880 million specifically—in surgical recovery funding for our hospitals to increase surgical hours and address procedures that were delayed as a result of COVID-19, and $300 million of that almost a billion dollars was invested this year.

As a next step, our government is making it faster and easier for people to access the surgeries and the procedures they need by better integrating and using community surgical and diagnostic centres to increase capacity and complete more publicly funded services.

Increasing community capacity will target patients who have been waiting the longest amount of time for treatment and expand available options to receive safe, quality care. This means that there will be shorter wait times for common but vital surgeries such as cataracts and hip and knee replacements, and you can expect shorter wait times for diagnostic services such as MRI and CT scans.

This is important: In committee, Dr. Agarwal shared that “Everyone knows someone who’s waiting for diagnostic imaging. This is a fact. It’s a sad fact in Ontario and in Canada, but it is a fact. If we are able to diagnose diseases earlier, patients will do better. It’s not just their outcomes, but we’re going to save the system money and we’re going to decrease patient anxiety.

“I used to do a lot of breast imaging, and I would tell you, the amount of anxiety that exists when you read a mammogram and you call someone—we read mammograms, and say we’re suspicious of something. The way that breast imaging is set up is that we have to be ultra careful, so the majority of the time, when we’re calling women back, it’s for something that’s benign, but women don’t know that.

“I’ve seen this in my own family members. I’ve seen this in my relatives. I’ve seen this in my patients. There’s a lot of anxiety, and now if you’re waiting a week, two weeks, for your next test, that’s a terrible two weeks. We just don’t need to have that. We’re one of the richest countries in the world, and we can do better.” So said Dr. Agarwal, and we agree.

That’s exactly why we’re moving ahead with this legislation to improve access to MRI and CT across the province.

In addition to shortening wait times, providing these publicly funded services through community surgical and diagnostic centres will allow hospitals to focus their efforts and resources on more complex and high-risk surgeries.

Dr. Andy Smith, CEO of Sunnybrook Health Sciences, was at the committee and shared, “With regard to surgery and imaging capacity: We need to improve access to surgical care, now.

“One approach that is enabled in Your Health Act is support to partner with community surgical centres, which I’ll call CSCs. We are encouraged by this opportunity because of the successes we have observed already to this point with CSCs.

“We have had success in delivering cataract surgery at Kensington Eye Institute and endoscopy services at many community centres for many years. Additionally, we have developed coordinated partnerships with community diagnostic centres to support patients with faster testing for cardiac diagnoses, for example.

“Most recently, we have had success with delivering increased volumes of specialized ear surgery for patients who can’t hear properly. Our team at Sunnybrook is world-class resourced for state-of-the-art surgery to restore hearing. But, as the pandemic receded, we found ourselves with a greater than two-year wait-list and inability to get surgery done fast enough at Sunnybrook because of the multiple competing demands for operating room resources.

“Think of this situation from a patient perspective. Imagine a frail older person living alone with minimal family support. Imagine now that they cannot hear. That robs the person of the ability to listen to CBC on the radio or to watch a favourite TV show. Deafness erodes quality of life unbearably.

“The care team that such people need is available. We needed to find ways to expand access immediately, if not sooner. Together with superb physician leadership, we developed a partnership with a community surgical centre, engaged government support and have been able to develop a sustained approach to getting care to the people and shrinking that wait-list.” That was the CEO of Sunnybrook, Andy Smith.

Speaker, the Ontario Medical Association agreed, saying “If we were to roll it all up, we’re really quite aligned, principally, with what the government is intending to do on behalf of our families, our neighbours and our communities to improve access to procedures that they ought not to be waiting six months, 12 months or two years, in some cases” for. That’s exactly what we’re doing by investing more than $18 million in existing centres to cover care for thousands of patients, including more than 49,000 hours of MRI and CT scans, 4,800 cataract surgeries, 900 other ophthalmic surgeries, 1,000 minimally invasive gynecological surgeries and 2,845 plastic surgeries.

Surgical wait times and wait-lists have returned to pre-pandemic levels but more needs to be done. As our government has said before, when it comes to your health, the status quo is no longer acceptable. Our government is taking bold action to eliminate surgical backlogs and reduce wait times for publicly funded surgeries and procedures. And as always, services will continue to be conducted at no cost to the patient with their Ontario health card.

Another important initiative we’re tackling is the existing backlog for cataract surgeries, which has one of the longest waits for procedures in Ontario. In February, we issued four new licences to health centres in Windsor, Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa to support an additional 14,000 publicly funded cataract surgeries annually. These additional volumes make up to 25% of the province’s current cataract wait-list, which will help significantly reduce the surgical backlog.

Beyond all the work that our government is doing to address the surgical backlog, we’re also building up our health care system for the future. One of the key investments we’re making to achieve this is expanding access to primary care. When people have health care available in their own communities and in ways that are convenient for them, they’re more likely to seek and receive the treatment they need when they need it and stay healthier. Delivering convenient care to people in their communities will help keep Ontario healthier by ensuring illnesses are diagnosed earlier, starting treatment as soon as possible and keeping emergency room wait times down for when you and your family need urgent care.

Ontario leads the country in the number of people who benefit from a long-term and stable relationship with a family doctor or primary care provider. Over 90% of Ontarians have a regular health care provider. But we can do more, and we will do more. That’s why we’re increasing training opportunities at the same time as expanding team models of primary care across the province of Ontario. Work is already under way to train the next generation of doctors, nurses, personal support workers and other health professionals in this province. We’re expanding training spots to more health professionals in Ontario every year with 455 new spots for physicians in training, 52 new spots for physician assistant training spots, 150 new nurse practitioner spots, 1,500 additional nursing spots and 24,000 personal support workers in training by the end of 2023.

As Dr. Smith, CEO of Sunnybrook, agreed, “With health human resources, we have terrific health care professionals and teams” here “in Ontario. But their numbers are diminished, and they are tired as we advance through the post-pandemic period. This challenge must be faced with energy, resolve and innovation. Recruitment, retention and expanded training opportunities are an important part of the solution. There has been a real can-do attitude about this in recent months and years, and together with government, looking at lots of different aspects to enhance collaboration. All of the solutions are essential. No one (solution) is going to get us to where we need to be.” And that’s the quote from the CEO of Sunnybrook, Dr. Andy Smith.

Speaker, by adding new health human resources to Ontario’s workforce, more team-based care will be made available to Ontarians.

When family physicians work in a team model alongside other family physicians, nurses, dietitians, social workers, pharmacists and other health care providers and professionals to deliver programs and services, you get better continuity of care and more access to after-hours care which may be more convenient for you.

We are increasing the number of spots for physicians to join a team model of care through the expansion of existing family health organizations and allowing new ones to form. This will add up to 1,200 physicians in this model over the next two years, starting with an additional 720 spots for physicians interested in joining the family health organization model in 2022-23 and 480 spots for those interested in joining in 2023-24.

I just want to take a moment to say, Madam Speaker, that I had the opportunity to visit the North York Family Health Team recently and had a great tour of their facility, talked to the doctors there, and they’re very excited about the future and about having more doctors join this model and other health providers join this model. It’s partly in our Your Health plan with this announcement of expanded family health teams and family health organizations, but also we have Ontario health teams, which we’ve been working on since very early on when we were elected, and those Ontario health teams are now—54 of them covering 99% of the province, and the next stage in their development is integration of primary care.

I was talking with the doctors at the North York Family Health Team, and one of them is very actively involved in integrating primary care into their Ontario health team. And of course it’s easier to integrate the family health teams and the family health organizations, because they’re already organized in team-based models, but we want to get all of the primary care practitioners into these team models to work together in their Ontario health team so they’ll be able to work as a more integrated, coordinated team.

Team models of primary care have demonstrated how bringing health care providers together as one team can improve the patient experience in how people access care. They’re required to provide comprehensive primary care services, extend evening and weekend hours of practice and provide more weekend coverage so you can access a family physician when you need one—and it’s a great model.

Ontario’s population is expected to increase by almost 15% over the next 10 years, Madam Speaker. The population of seniors in Ontario aged 75 and older is expected to increase by 49.3%, from 1.2 million to 1.8 million, over the same 10-year period. By contrast, Ontario’s 65-plus seniors population will increase from 2.5 million in 2019 to 4.6 million by 2046. So the population over 65 in Ontario will make up 23% of all Ontarians by 2046. With this and all of the immigrants that we’re bringing into Ontario, we know that we need to continue to grow our health care workforce to meet the needs of our growing population.

These are all very important aspects of our development in health care. I think we also mentioned, as part of our plan for convenient and connected care, that we’re working on centralized wait-list management, and the government is investing in digital tools to enhance coordination of surgical services between hospitals to enable better patient flow through the implementation of a centralized wait-list management program which is being rolled out province-wide for the first time in Ontario’s history. This is really important to make our surgical and diagnostic clinics coordinated and integrated with our hospitals, but it’s also really important to make sure that the care is there when we need it, and it can be referred as needed. So I’m very excited about that investment.

We’re investing $30 million into centralized wait-list management, and investments in this are providing funding for regionally led projects across the province that support more equitable distribution of surgical cases and reductions in patient wait times, as well as investments for the development of the technical infrastructure at Ontario Health which is required to support centralized wait-list management at the provincial level. That’s another important part of what the government is doing to make sure that we have a connected system.

All of these initiatives—Ontario health teams, family health teams, family health organizations—the expansions of all of those are going to help make our system function better and help people stay well and stay out of hospital as much as possible, making sure a hospital is available when they need it without a huge amount of waiting in the emergency rooms. We want to make sure people can get in and get the care they need when they get there.

In closing, I wanted to share another quote from the committee, from the evidence of Mr. David Graham, who is the president and CEO of the Scarborough Health Network. From his evidence at the committee, let me just share this quote with the Legislature today: “For those of you who may not know, SHN has three hospitals across Scarborough serving an identified catchment area of over 830,000 individuals. In a typical day, we treat 500 patients in our three emergency departments, 800 participants and patients in our in-patient units and 1,300 patients in our outpatient clinics. We perform over 900 diagnostic imaging tests and 140 surgeries.

“We also have one of the largest orthopedic and eye programs in the region. SHN’s eye program is designated as a regional centre of excellence and consists of 10 full-time ophthalmologists covering pediatric, retina, glaucoma, corneal and cataract procedures. In 2022, the eye program finished 5,700 quality-based procedures, plus an additional 1,000 cases on the provincial waiting list, totalling 6,600 cases in 2022. We are extremely proud of our surgical programs and the work they are doing to not only lower the wait times in Scarborough, but across the region.

“However, we know that any wait is” too long “for someone who requires surgery. Every surgery is an urgent surgery when you or your loved one is the one waiting. I welcome the opportunity to work with our government, Ministry of Health and Ontario Health partners to integrate community surgical centres and diagnostic centres into the broader publicly funded and publicly administered health system and establish new partnerships between SHN and community-based surgical clinics to help ensure equitable and accessible publicly funded surgical care for patients.”

That is the quote from David Graham, who is the president and CEO of the Scarborough Health Network. He said that at his presentation at committee.

Speaker, this plan, and our significant investments in our health care system, will incorporate lessons learned from COVID-19 and ensure that we are prepared and equipped to meet the health care needs of Ontarians for years to come. All of the investments we’re making are critical. No one solution, as Dr. Andy Smith said, is going to solve the problem. We need to work on all fronts to make sure that we are providing care to people when and where they need it.

We’re excited to work with our partners, and I’ve read to you a number of quotations from those partners of what can be done to fix the system and how people are looking forward to being able to treat people and give them access to the treatments they need—the diagnostic imaging, the scans, the surgeries—as quickly as possible. And we’re really excited to move forward with this next step.

If we pass Bill 60, we believe that we’re going to be able to improve patient access to care and make it much more timely for people. After all, we think that is extremely important, as Dr. Agarwal said in the quotes that I read earlier. The anxiety of waiting for the results of your test, the anxiety of waiting for treatment when you’re sick is not good for anybody. We want to make sure people get the care they need as quickly as possible—good, quality care through our publicly funded health care system.

I was at committee, and I heard all of the testimony. A number of things raised by witnesses, some of the ones you mentioned—and by the way, every quote I mentioned is actually in Hansard as well, and people heard what those quotes are. A number of the things you mentioned are things that the government is aware of, and the government is taking steps to make sure we are protecting health care workforces in hospitals. We’re working with, as all of the quotes said, health care providers, we’re working with doctors, we’re working with the centralized wait-list management, and we’re working with the new surgical centres and the hospital administrators to make sure that the health care workforce is properly provided and to make sure there is no poaching.

Thank you very much for the question from the member for Hamilton West–Ancaster–Dundas. In fact, I would think the members opposite would be supporting Bill 60, because for 30 years in this province, we’ve had something like 900 independent health facilities, and what Bill 60 does is integrate those 900 independent health facilities—which, by the way, have been renewed licences for 30 years under every government of every political stripe in this province. But this piece of legislation actually integrates those formerly—after we pass Bill 60, hopefully—independent health facilities into integrated surgical community centres, which will be integrated with our health care system.

But what are we doing to make sure people are not having to worry about oversight, etc.? We’re making people post uninsured charges online and in person so a discussion can happen ahead of time; a process for responding to complaints; patients can’t be denied treatment if they don’t purchase uninsured services; and the Patient Ombudsman—