Well, we always knew Doug Ford’s slogans wouldn’t be enough to fix Ontario’s dangerously overcrowded emergency rooms and hospital hallways.

Now we have the depressing numbers to show just how short the Ford government has come in fulfilling its election promise, never mind actually improving the province’s healthcare system.

This past June was the worst June on record for hospital overcrowding since the province began collecting statistics in 2008 to track so-called “hallway medicine.” The average wait to be admitted to hospital from an emergency department topped 16 hours, according to the provincial agency Health Quality Ontario. That’s even more troubling given the winter spikes are still to come.

“This situation is not viable,” said Ontario Hospital Association president Anthony Dale. “Our backs are against the wall.”

That’s exactly the same message that Dale, along with the heads of Ontario’s home care system and long-term care homes, delivered before the provincial election when Ford was breezily promising to put an end to what he called “hallway health care.”

Since then there’s only been increasing evidence that the immediate needs of Ontario’s home care system, long-term care homes and hospitals are largely being ignored while the government focuses on a much-publicized but little-understood overhaul of health care.

The problems are getting worse but the premier seems to be stuck in a loop with his own campaign slogan.

As recently as July, Ford boldly announced that there won’t be anyone in hospital hallways within a year.

That was so obviously untrue that his own health minister, Christine Elliott, had to rush out and clarify that the government “can’t put a specific timeline on it.”

So, hallway medicine hasn’t been fixed a year into Ford’s mandate and it won’t be fixed in the next year either. In fact, Ontario is only further behind, thanks to this government.

Instead of simply and quickly moving ahead on the solutions that were well known prior to the election, the Ford government opted to create chaos within a system that was already struggling to deliver the services Ontarians need.

It has initiated a healthcare overhaul, promising unnamed system innovations and replacing Local Health Integration Networks (created under the McGuinty Liberals) with “Ontario Health Teams,” which will be different and better at providing for patients and integrating care.

How exactly? That’s not clear.

To a large degree, the government’s airy pronouncements about creating a “seamless” and “21st-century approach” to health care have just served to buy time to figure out how to deliver on its election promises to cut hospital wait times, end hallway medicine, build 30,000 long-term care beds and invest in mental health. All without ever detailing how they intend to pay for it given their other promises to find billions in so-called efficiencies and tackle the deficit.

Ontarians know well how rarely better patient care and cost-cutting go together.

The hospital will always be the place people go when they have no other options. The Ford government needs to move more quickly on concrete measures to expand and better integrate home care and community supports to provide for more Ontarians long before they get to a hospital hallway.

And it needs to speed up its glacial pace on opening transitional beds so patients waiting for long-term care homes don’t have to stay in hospitals longer than medically required and get some of those promised long-term care beds under construction.

These latest troubling numbers on hospital overcrowding should serve to remind the government that sick patients can’t be put on hold while it gets its act together.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2019/09/05/fords-slogans-arent-fixing-health-care.html