The Cambridge Memorial Hospital unable to staff its ER, it contracted a private agency to run the department. Med-Emerg of Mississauga specializes in providing temporary medical staff — nurses, pharmacists, doctors, and so on — as it does at 20 hospitals across the province. In Cambridge Memorial’s case, it hired the firm to run the whole emergency-room operation, as it already does at London’s University Hospital, and installed one of Med-Emerg’s executives to lead it.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said earlier this month that his government was “caught off guard” by the ER problems that have led to dramatic reductions in staff and threats of closures.

• Dr Ken Milne is a Public Affairs Committee member of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, an ER physician and family physician and joins us today to provide some frontline perspective to this situation.