#Spectacular #increase #private #operations #Outaouais
The proportion of operations carried out in the private sector in Outaouais has increased from less than 1% to 49% in two years. From now on, almost half of the operations are carried out in specialized medical centers, worry those in the health sector.
Between 2020-2021 and 2022-2023, the number of operations that were subcontracted in private clinics by the Outaouais Integrated Health and Social Services Center (CISSS) increased from 46 to 6,601, reveal data obtained by the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS) from the Ministry of Health.
“It’s a privatization that is very rapid and very massive,” notes Anne Plourde, researcher at IRIS.
“There is no other region in Quebec that has experienced such a strong increase,” she underlines in an interview with the QMI Agency.
If the phenomenon is surprising in its scale, it is above all its possible consequences which worry Anne Plourde.
“It is the public’s ability to offer urgent, priority surgeries to more vulnerable patients with greater needs that will be jeopardized,” she said.
For the chairman of the board of directors of Action santé Outaouais, Denis Marcheterre, this jump in operations in the private sector is “good news and bad news at the same time”.
“Good in the sense that there are many patients who are satisfied with being able to move quickly to the surgical table,” he says.
“In the medium to long term, we end up shooting ourselves in the foot in the sense that private clinics perform surgeries that are profitable and then easy for them to do,” he explains.
Impact on staff
In addition to the fear of a reduction in public sector capacity, the massive transfer of operations to the private sector risks posing another challenge, according to the researcher.
“You should know that private clinics draw from the same labor pool as public hospitals. And here, we are in a situation of staff shortage as is the case almost everywhere in Quebec,” explains Anne Plourde.
The IRIS researcher also fears a generalization of the phenomenon.
“What we see in Outaouais, we can fear that the same type of phenomenon will occur elsewhere if we move towards such significant privatization in other regions eventually,” she adds.
With the collaboration of Amanda Moisan, from Agence QMI
