CORNWALL, Ontario – MPP Jim McDonell Wednesday slammed the governing of Ontario’s 14 Community Care Access Centres, accusing executives of lining their own pockets at the expense of patient care.
“Clients of the Champlain CCAC reported seeing their services reduced or cut altogether since last summer,” McDonell said.
Ontario’s auditor-general released a damning report into the management of Ontario’s 14 CCACs, which oversee the delivery of home care and long-term care for thousands of people.
The report lays bare concerning trends, such as the fact that CCACs reported profits and overheads as patient care spending, did not perform any economic studies on whether their service delivery model was effective and did not focus on patients’ care outcomes.
“Executive salaries, according to the auditor-general, have climbed at the same rate as the CCAC’s funding, however the CCAC’s chronic and palliative client load almost doubled,” he said. “These clients need more intense care, but the CCAC can’t fund more care and more executive compensation at the same time – so they chose the latter. This is unacceptable.”
According to the report, more than 25 per cent of all CCAC funding was not spent on services to patients.
“CCAC’s claims of spending 90 per cent of their funding on patients could only be justified by fuzzy accounting,” McDonell said. “This report strips these figures of the waste, profits and overheads. Twenty-eight percent of CCAC’s funding is not spent on their clients.
“Some CCACs gave their CEOs unjustified signing bonuses and annual payouts. In other cases, CCACs did not measure the effectiveness of their service delivery programs thus avoiding internal accountability for their spending.”
Not surprisingly, McDonell – a Tory – took a shot at the governing Liberals.
“Today’s report is a strong wake-up call for the government. The Community Care Access Centre model needs to be reformed with strong accountability initiatives and objective, measurable standards in place,” he said. “Home care and long-term care are not to be considered just a source of free bonuses and good news stories. Patients’ health and quality of life are at stake – these should be the CCAC’s only priorities.”
