Health care advocacy group Concerned Ontario Doctors (COD) believes institutional racism has played a large role in Brampton’s chronic health-care underfunding and ongoing health-care emergency.

Brampton council voted unanimously to declare a health-care emergency at its Jan. 22 meeting after hearing some sobering statistics during a presentation by COD.

COD president Dr. Kulvinder Gill, who operates a clinic in Brampton, called the city the “epicentre of Ontario’s health-care crisis and hallway medicine crisis.”

“I’d like for us to take a moment to name and acknowledge the white elephant in the room — institutional racism,” she said. “How is it that a community like Brampton can get to this breaking point? How is it that governments know what is happening and turn a blind eye?

“It exists in Canada and it exists in Ontario. It’s important to name because Brampton is the most ethnically and racially diverse city in Canada, where 73 per cent of our residents identify as persons of colour. I think this needs to be named and it needs to be acknowledged, because it will not be addressed until we acknowledge it,” added Gill.

Gill pointed to studies in recent years using postal codes which show lower service levels and health outcomes in low-income and racialized communities.

"There's a large body of research which has looked at institutional racism and there's also a lot of studies that have been done looking at racism that's institutionalized both in health-care delivery and in health-care funding," said Gill.

"There was a study that was actually published in Ontario that was also looking at health-care outcomes and they tracked those postal codes that were both lower in terms of socioeconomic status, but then also in terms of more diverse populations, and they found that health outcomes were lower compared to the rest of the population. They also had a decreased lifespan compared to the national average," she added.

According to COD, Brampton receives $937 per resident in health-care funding, compared to the provincial average of approximately $2,000. Canada’s ninth-largest-city also has the lowest number of beds in the province at 0.9 per 1,000 residents — the provincial average is 2.3. Gill said the city needs 850 new beds to match the current provincial average.

Brampton’s only full-service hospital is seeing approximately 140,000 patients per year, but it was designed and built to accommodate 90,000 annually. The Peel Memorial Urgent Care Centre, which opened in 2017, was is funded to service 10,000 visitors and is already operated at roughly 75,000 visits per year.