Hospitals across Ontario have dramatically ramped up their use of nurses from private staffing agencies to the tune of untold millions of dollars, according to the province’s auditor general.
A new auditor’s report finds that hospitals are filling staffing gaps by hiring agency nurses at significantly higher hourly rates than they pay the nurses they directly employ.
The report found some hospitals that more than tripled their spending on agency nurses in the course of just one year, from 2021-22 to 2022-23, while hospitals in northern Ontario saw a 25-fold increase in their use of agency nurses over a four-year stretch.
The trend “has put financial pressures on hospitals,”
