Children's health organizations want funding tied to improving kids' access to care

By next year, almost half of children will be waiting longer for planned and scheduled care, including surgeries, than is medically safe, CHEO's Alex Munter says.

Pediatric health officials want provinces and territories to be accountable to children and their families as part of any new federal-provincial health-care agreement.

Children’s health organizations are calling for provinces to partner with the federal government to create “meaningful targets and timelines to improve children’s health and wellbeing in Canada,” according to Emily Gruenwoldt Carkner, president and CEO of Children’s Healthcare Canada.

That came as Canadian premiers continued Friday to call for more federal health funding, but with no strings attached. During a media conference, provincial and territorial premiers called for a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the new year to discuss health-care funding transfers, but without accountability measures.

The ongoing children’s health crisis was front and centre during that media conference.

The unprecedented surge of severe viral illnesses in children has stretched children’s hospitals beyond capacity. Children’s health organizations want to see urgent funding to build the capacity of the pediatric health system and targets that make provinces and territories accountable to improve children’s access to health care.

CHEO President and CEO Alex Munter said accountability was crucial in order to “right-size” the children’s health care system, which doesn’t have enough capacity to deal with demands and which has been strained to a breaking point by the ongoing respiratory virus surge.

CHEO has been in headlines across Canada after bringing in Red Cross members to help deal with the crisis.

Munter said CHEO officials feared what could come after the surge almost as much as the current crisis. By next year, almost half of children will be waiting longer for planned and scheduled care, including surgeries, than is medically safe, he said.

“There is a slow-motion surge happening and that is the backlog of outpatient care and that will be even greater than it was six months ago,” Munter said.

The crisis in access to care for children is both acute this fall and chronic, and those in the children’s health community are hoping a new federal-provincial health-funding agreement will address that.

When asked what plans he had to immediately help CHEO after it had to bring in the Red Cross, Ontario Premier Doug Ford gave a shout-out to Munter, saying he “thinks outside the box.”

Ford said it was crucial for the prime minister to sit down with the premiers to hammer out a deal for long-term sustainable funding for the health system.

“We have not problem with accountability and transparency. We have accountability and transparency every day.”

Ford said provinces and territories needed the flexibility to transfer money “from one area to another.”

Munter said he was optimistic there would be a new federal-provincial health funding agreement and was grateful there had been a focus on the issue of children’s health care.

And he supported the call from Children’s Healthcare Canada for accountability when it came to access to health care for children.

Levels of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which led to record numbers of children in hospital and intensive care units, are beginning to level off in Ottawa, Munter said, but influenza cases are still rising and the hospital’s ICU remains over capacity.

“It won’t last forever. There is definitely light at the end of the tunnel, but then we have got this backlog,” Munter said.