(November 28, 2025)

By: Jason Setnyk, Seaway News

Privatization of hospital surgeries in England has been “catastrophic” and should warn Ontario, Prof. Allyson Pollock told reporters at the Cornwall Public Library on Friday.

Pollock, professor emerita at Newcastle University, joined Ontario Health Coalition executive director Natalie Mehra and OCHU-CUPE president Michael Hurley to release new research on two decades of privatized cataract, hip, and knee surgeries in England and Scotland. England, she said, used public funds to contract procedures to for-profit clinics, weakening public hospitals. “Our studies show that diverting money from public hospitals to private clinics has destabilized services and training and shifted staff away from public hospitals,” Pollock said. While wait times initially fell for patients able to access private clinics, she said inequalities grew as poorer and sicker patients waited longer for care in England, unlike in Scotland, which kept surgeries in the public system.

By 2024, 59 per cent of cataract surgeries and 60 per cent of hip and knee replacements in England were done in for-profit facilities. Five companies were estimated to have taken £90 million in a single year from publicly funded cataract operations.

The coalition says the research offers lessons for Ontario, where the government is expanding the use of private clinics for cataract, hip and knee surgeries and diagnostic tests. Between 2017 and 2022, about 19 per cent of cataract surgeries in Ontario were already performed in private clinics.

Pollock called for “a complete moratorium on all privatization of elective surgery” and for existing contracts to be reviewed and brought back into public hospitals. The Ontario Health Coalition also used the Cornwall news conference to highlight access to surgeries locally, including what it describes as unethical practices at a for-profit clinic in the city that offered “queue-jumping” and urged the province to reinvest in public hospitals instead of “cannibalizing” them.

Link to original article: https://www.cornwallseawaynews.com/local/advocates-urge-halt-to-surgery-privatization/