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The Ottawa Hospital disagrees with the union’s link between the readmission rate and budget cuts and maintains that its readmission rates, although up from previous years, are in line with similar hospitals across the country.

Dr. Alan Forster, chief quality and performance officer at the hospital, said readmission rates have generally been “trending up” for complex reasons that include an aging population and the fact that medicine can now keep more people alive than in the past, which means “we have more sick people going home and it is likely some of them will come back.” Age, he said, is the biggest risk factor for readmission to hospital.

Forster said connecting readmission rates to hospital cuts is “not correct.” The hospital, which has faced a funding freeze over the past four years, has not made cuts in areas that would affect the patients being readmitted, he added.

Forster said he believes the numbers should promote some action but that should go beyond the hospital and involve improving supports and care for the elderly, largely, in the community. “We need to think about how we look after people.”

Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, said CUPE looked at readmission numbers from the Canadian Institute of Health Information after it began hearing reports from hospital workers about patients they believed were being discharged too soon.

The CIHI numbers back up that anecdotal evidence, he said, and particularly point to a problem at The Ottawa Hospital, whose readmission rates are higher than the national and provincial averages, higher than the average within the Champlain Local Health Integration Network and higher than other teaching hospitals (a category The Ottawa Hospital says includes some facilities that are less complex and therefore not directly comparable).