During last year’s Ontario election campaign, when Anthony Dale, head of the Ontario Hospital Association, wanted to talk about fixing “hallway medicine,” which Doug Ford had turned into a campaign slogan, he brought two people with him.

And it was the heads of Ontario’s home care services and long-term care homes who spoke first because it’s in their fields, not his, where the best answers to this problem are to be found.

Ontario’s hallway medicine crisis, which manifests as backed-up emergency rooms, delayed surgeries, and overly creative decisions about what hospital spaces can house beds (patient lounges to storage rooms) is caused by having too many people in hospital beds who should be somewhere else. That’s a long-term care bed or, better still, their own home with home care services and community supports.

Dale took less than an hour last year to explain that in detail to the Star’s editorial board. So how on earth did it take the premier’s handpicked and highly paid special adviser, Dr. Rueben Devlin, seven months to come to a similar conclusion?

Indeed, Devlin’s first report on improving health care and ending hallway medicine released last week does little more than sum up the problems. Ontario’s health care system does not provide the “appropriate mix of services”; it doesn’t “integrate care around the patient”; and it leaves people “receiving care in the wrong place.”

That’s a lot of months of effort by Devlin and the 13 other experts on the premier’s council to land in the same place that anyone in this province who’s been to an emergency room, waited for an appropriate long-term care bed, or struggled to get home care and community supports for a loved one has long known.

So was this whole exercise just an excuse to buy the government time to figure out how to deliver on its election promises? The Ford PCs were elected on a platform that vowed to cut hospital wait times, end hallway medicine, build 30,000 long-term care beds and invest billions in mental health, but crucially without costing that all out or showing how the government would pay for it.

Or is it part of the more worrisome explanation put forward by NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, hours after Devlin’s report was released, that the government already has a plan but doesn’t want to tell the public about it?

Horwath released a copy of the government’s draft legislation that would create a “super agency” to manage health-care services across the province and give the health minister new powers to overhaul all aspects of the system with little notice and no public input. She fears the underlying intent of that is to empower the Ford government to privatize more services.

Health Minister Christine Elliott says Horwath is way off base and the government remains committed to “publicly funded health care.” But since she declined to talk about the 81-page draft bill entitled the “Health Systems Efficiency Act,” or explain how the super agency is intended to work, that doesn’t clear much up for Ontarians who are confused and concerned.

So either the Ford government doesn’t have a plan or it has a secret plan. Neither option provides the slightest cause for confidence in this government, or its ability to tackle a problem with as many moving parts as health care.

At first glance, creating a super agency to replace a bunch of other agencies seems a lot like moving deck chairs around on the Titanic. It’s a distraction from the real problem and risks creating chaos within a system already struggling to deliver the services Ontarians need.

The Ford government should just get moving on the necessary retooling of health care to expand and better integrate home care, community supports and long-term beds to provide for Ontarians long before they get to a hospital hallway.

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