One Year Later: Historic Ontario Pediatric Healthcare Funding Results in Increased Access to Care

July 19, 2024

MEDIA RELEASE from the Children's Health Coalition, follow this link to read the statement on the coalition's website.

Friday, July 19, 2024 – One year after Premier Ford announced an historic $330 million investment in kids’ health and well-being, the children’s health system is expanding services and improving response times to better support the health and well-being of Ontario’s children and families.

With approximately $265 million of this funding allocated and announced to date, kids and families are already seeing the benefits. Improvements include bolstered care for kids with disabilities and developmental needs; expansion of community-based child and youth mental health care; increased number of surgeries, procedures and hospital beds at Ontario’s pediatric hospital centres; retention and hiring of more staff across the province; and the delivery of more programs in partnership. We look forward to the allocation of the remaining $65 million to help even more Ontarians.

Highlights of health care innovations and capacity building enabled by this new funding include:

• CHEO increased access to care with total visits up 25 per cent compared to pre-pandemic levels, including 2,733 visits to temporary after-hours and weekend outpatient clinics. Funding for urgent care centres and the Emergency Department resulted in over 30,000 additional visits. A new regional pediatric surgical program was launched across eastern Ontario, bringing care closer to home and cutting wait times. Funding also helped decrease wait times at CHEO’s outpatient clinics and for MRI’s that require general anesthesia. To accomplish this work, CHEO was also able to add 258 new positions, thanks to the funding.
• Children’s Mental Health Ontario has worked in partnership with the Lead Agency Consortium and the Knowledge Institute on Child and Youth Mental Health and Addictions to transform the delivery of care and address long wait times for children and youth across the province requiring intensive treatment through the Ontario Intensive Treatment Pathway (OITP). This initiative will better coordinate services and enhance evidence-based, quality, intensive treatment capacity across the province – all so that families can get the mental health care and support they need, closer to home, and when they need it.
• Member organizations of Empowered Kids Ontario that support children with disabilities and developmental differences have begun to stabilize their workforces, including in Ontario’s North, where recruitment and retention of top talent can be particularly challenging. The sector has also increased the number of kids receiving treatment with regulated and other health professionals, and has introduced new programs in some communities such as aquatic therapy for pre- and post- surgery treatment.
• Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital has increased staffing by 10 per cent, enabling increased inpatient capacity with four new inpatient rehabilitation beds, as well as serving 60 per cent more clients in the day patient unit. Approximately 800 children and youth who would still be waiting for a range of outpatient services have been able to see highly skilled developmental health care experts as a result of this investment.
• Children’s Hospital at London Health Sciences Centre has enabled even timelier access to care and services for children and adolescents. This includes timelier access to surgical services as reflected in a 25% surgical waitlist reduction; improved access to emergency care through the new Emergency Department Mental Health Team, expanded night emergency clinic and the virtual Emergency Department clinic; increased access to ambulatory clinics through our evening/weekend clinics; and advanced partnerships with community agencies to enable care closer to home.
• McMaster Children’s Hospital has focused on significantly improving access to timely patient care across multiple areas of the hospital and the Ron Joyce Children’s Health Centre. In less than a year, over 4,000 additional patients have been cared for in funded outpatient clinics; over 330 additional children have been treated in eight new pediatric medicine beds; 512 additional children received surgeries from October 2023 to March 2024, which is a 27 per cent increase compared to the same period the year prior; the Pediatric Palliative Care Program has expanded to increase support for children and youth with life-limiting conditions across the region; and more. This work was enabled by the rapid addition of over 300 new specialized health care roles, including nurses, physicians, psychologists, physiotherapists, social workers, and other pediatric experts.
• SickKids has continued to work with community partners to address the surgical backlog across the Greater Toronto Area by referring almost 700 cases across the partner sites. As a result, SickKids’ surgical waitlist is now below 6,000 cases for the first time since December 2022. The funding has also made a difference in SickKids’ Virtual Urgent Care Program, developed to help support volumes in the Emergency Department, by enabling over 1300 visits over the past year.

This historic investment in children’s health care has been a critical step towards right-sizing the pediatric health system to meet the growing needs of Ontario’s almost 3 million children and their families. It has alleviated many barriers to care and allowed Ontario’s dedicated pediatric healthcare professionals to better serve kids across the province. 

By the end of the pandemic, kids were waiting longer than adults for healthcare across all clinical streams – medical, surgical, developmental and rehabilitation, mental health and diagnostics. During COVID, 440,000 babies were born in Ontario, and we know at least 10 to 20 per cent of children and youth need medical, developmental, or mental healthcare to succeed and thrive. This has significant impact not only on the health of these children, but on their social, educational, and developmental needs. Without urgent action in the early years, when it makes the most difference, children’s overall well-being is negatively impacted now and into the future. We must continue to keep children’s health and well-being front and centre to monitor and respond to this generation’s unmet needs and impact on schools, families and communities.
We must continue to build on the momentum and innovation made possible by this transformational funding with sustained and continued investments to ensure all infants, children, youth and families have timely access to the care and supports they need, when and where they need them.

Kids can’t afford to wait. Early intervention is often the least costly approach and has long-term positive impacts for the child, the family, the community and the economy.

The Children’s Health Coalition represents expertise in pediatric health care and research; developmental health; mental health services, intensive services and acute care; physical, cognitive and communication disabilities; as well as emergency and complex care.

In other words, we deliver every kind of health care a child could need – and we see how the elements of care can work together to support kids if we look at the entire system as a whole.
That’s why we will continue in partnership to advance our goal to deliver integrated children’s health care – so that the entire health care system works better to support kids and their families no matter what challenges they are facing.

About the Children’s Health Coalition

The Children’s Health Coalition is a collective of eight leading Ontario children’s health organizations: CHEO, Children’s Hospital – London Health Sciences Centre, Children’s Mental Health Ontario, Empowered Kids Ontario, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, Kids Health Alliance, McMaster Children’s Hospital and SickKids.

We represent expertise in pediatric health care and research; rehabilitation; mental health services like targeted prevention, early intervention, short and long-term counselling and therapy, addictions services, intensive services, and acute care; physical, cognitive, and communication disabilities; as well as emergency and complex care. We deliver every kind of care a child could need, and we see how the elements of care can work together to support their families no matter what challenges they are facing.