Speaker, London West parents are worried. One mother wrote to me: “Parents are looking for guidance from our leadership right now and we are getting nothing. As a parent to a three-year-old son, I am terrified when I see the news about pediatric ICU beds.” Another said, “The state of our health care system, particularly pediatrics, is horrifying. As the mom of a toddler who has been sick with COVID, hand foot and mouth, and pink eye in the past six weeks, I am terrified.... While we have been lucky to not have to go to the ER yet, I am fearful of what we will experience when we arrive.” What she will experience at London’s Children’s Hospital is a stressful hours-long wait in a crowded emergency room that was built to handle about 100 visits per day but is being overwhelmed by 200 or more sick children—double the usual volume.

Parents of teens admitted to ICU now face the prospect of admission to an adult ICU bed, which has ICU nurses concerned about taking on teen ICU patients without specialized pediatric training.

Children’s Hospital emergency room director Dr. Rod Lim warned, “It may get worse before it gets better. I think November and December are going to be tough.”

Speaker, London parents are asking me, “What is this government doing about this crisis?” From the budget that was tabled yesterday, my answer is, clearly, “Not enough.”

As I’ve mentioned in my previous answers, we were preparing for this fall respiratory challenge in the previous budget that we passed in August. We prepared by anticipating that surge in pediatrics and making sure that hospitals serving both pediatric patients and adults were able to build their capacity. We’ve done that work.

I have to give a shout-out to the clinicians and the hospital leadership, who have worked together to make sure that when they experience a surge in their individual hospital, they work with their neighbouring community hospitals to ensure that patients who can be transferred back to their home community are able to do so.

We’re doing that work. We’re making those investments. We’ve invested in additional surgery backlogs, to ensure that people don’t have to wait an exorbitantly long time for their surgery. There are going to be challenges as we deal with the surge in flu, or in some cases RSV, but we’re working with our hospital leadership to make sure that we give them the support they need.