The Ontario government has halted bidding for home-care services in Hamilton and won't award contracts elsewhere in the province until the policy of allowing private companies to take part is reviewed, Health Minister George Smitherman said Wednesday.
  
The bidding in Hamilton drew heavy criticism after two non-profit agencies that have provided home care in the area for decades — the Victorian Order of Nurses and St. Joseph's Home Care — were barred from the process.
  
Those agencies have about 225 health-care staff and provide about 80 per cent of Hamilton's home-care visits, but their contracts expire in April.
  
Smitherman said he halted the bidding for a new contract with the Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant Community Care Access Centre because it was clear the changes were not going to work as intended.
  
"What I was striving for … was creating a stronger likelihood that the health-care worker would be delivering services to clients and to patients that they knew, that it would be leading to greater stability in that essential relationship," he said.
  
"When I saw us coming out of the gate in Hamilton in a situation that was actually disrupting that pretty sacred relationship, I thought we should, while the had the chance, take pause to examine the policy before we move forward in other parts of the province."
  
Smitherman said he would "not stand by while dedicated providers and vulnerable patients are left with a feeling of uncertainty" about their relationships with each other, and about exactly who would be entering someone's home to provide personal care.
  
"Trying to preserve that relationship is the primary thrust of my efforts," he said. "And it didn't seem like that was going to happen there, and I stepped in to stop it before we went too far."
  
The Opposition said Smitherman ignored earlier warnings that opening home-care services to competitive bidding would mean patients may lose their regular, long-term caregivers.
  
"It's just another example of this minister and this government making decisions after they've been warned of consequences, bulldozing their way forward," said Conservative health critic Elizabeth Witmer.
  
"There are a lot of people receiving care who are quite stressed about the fact that the caregiver they had for a number of years was no longer going to be providing care."
  
The New Democrats want the government to end the competitive bidding process across the entire home-care sector, saying it takes public dollars away from patient care and puts it into the pockets of big companies.
  
"Competitive bidding has decimated not-for-profit home-care providers and has seriously undervalued and under-compensated those dedicated to providing care," said NDP critic France Gelinas.
  
Smitherman wouldn't commit to ending the bidding process, but said there would be no home-care contracts awarded in Ontario until he is sure the policy would result in the more positive outcomes it was designed to deliver.

Move applauded

"There are no others that are imminent, so I saw an opportunity here to stop the one in Hamilton and to take advantage of just a little bit of time and some sober second thought on my part, to say where has the calculation gone awry," he said.
  
"I don't want to propose what that end point might be yet, because it's really important that I take a good hard look at it."
  
The Canadian Union of Public Employees applauded Smitherman's move to halt the bidding process in Hamilton, and said the entire plan was "doomed" from the start and that all competitive bidding on home care should be halted permanently.
  
"The elimination of not-for-profit providers at the outset of the bidding process was totally unacceptable to the community, as it was to CUPE," said the union's Ontario president, Sid Ryan.
  
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union also criticized the opening bidding process, calling it "flawed, costly and confusing."

The Registered Nurses Association of Ontario also applauded the decision.

"This was an invention of the Harris government and we are asking the McGuinty government to cancel this RFP process province wide, otherwise the public uproar we saw in Hamilton could spread across the province," said RNAO president Mary Ferguson-Pare.