According to the Financial Accountability Officer, one of Ontario’s fiscal watchdogs, Ontario consistently has among the lowest amount of per capita health spending in the country. They froze hospital budgets for decades and created the hallway medicine crisis. The current and past governments failed to keep up with the demands on our hospitals. That means investing in expanding capacity and creating more beds, and more nurses and health care workers to staff those beds.

Hamilton needs more resources to reduce the burden on overcrowded emergency rooms and to end hallway health care. The only true solution to the code zero crisis is fixing the problem upstream, in our hospitals. That’s fewer health care workers caring for more sick patients while they wait hours for a bed. The latest so-called solution from the Ford government is to ask paramedics to do more with less, “batching” patients in hospital hallways. 44 Date Treatment Started Occupational 45 Date Treatment Started Speech 46 Date Treatment Started Cardiac Rehab 47 Date Cost Outlier Begins A1 Birth Date- Insured A A2 Effective Date Insured A Policy A3 Benefits Exhausted A4 Split Bill Date 81cc. Things like a chest x-ray, a drug like Zofran, or a device, such as a pacemaker. Since Hamilton’s first reported code zero in 2006, provincial governments have proposed Band-Aid solutions that simply haven’t worked. This is a unique code that identifies a specific charge for a specific device, service, or drug. When it’s your job to facilitate lifesaving care, you have to expect to have the tools you need, but Hamilton’s emergency health care workers routinely do not. They’re also caught in this failing system, suffering from PTSD and burnout.

These dispatch workers share horror stories - a grandmother in cardiac arrest, a helpless mother forced to wait on hold while her baby chokes, a young person hit by a car - and worse. They often have to stay on the line with families stuck waiting for an ambulance, trying to keep them calm, while new callers are stuck on hold. The bottleneck affects ambulance dispatchers too. They want to be on the road helping people in emergencies, not waiting around in emergency hallways as the calls pile up and become unmanageable. Paramedics on the front lines tell us they feel stuck.

Hospital code zero