Ontario is falling short in providing mental health services for youth and in overseeing the safety of wells and other non-municipal water systems at cottages and farms, says the auditor general.
More than half the province’s 33 service areas offer inadequate supports for kids with mental health, with just 13 providing live-in treatment for those with the most severe needs, Shelley Spence said in one of two special reports released Monday.
The average wait time across the province for such intensive treatment is 105 days — more than three months.
“Access to a secure treatment program is also limited to only three agencies in the province, all located in the Greater Toronto area and eastern Ontario,” Spence wrote.
“Children and youth in other regions would need to be significantly distanced from their families to receive these services.”
In addition, such services “were not always provided in an evidence-based, timely, equitable and co-ordinated manner,” she found, noting that funding fell short in some areas of the province while other areas ran a total of $66 million in surpluses.
Most of those surpluses — more than $64 million — have yet to be collected, the report added.
The child and youth mental health system — in a province where one in five youth report mental health challenges — also found that wait times are too long, and are not consistently determined.
In a statement, the office of Health Minister Sylvia Jones said services should be provided in “a timely manner.”
“It is completely unacceptable that this is not the case,” the statement added, noting ministry officials have been directed “to make the changes required to improve access to services as quickly as possible.”
Meanwhile, some three million Ontarians, including cottagers, who get their water from wells and other non-municipal systems are at risk of contamination as a result of inadequate testing, the auditor warned.
While more than 98 per cent of samples taken from non-municipal systems in the last decade have met public health standards, risks remain because not all water is tested.
“Not all system owners test their water as required,” the report said, faulting the ministries of energy, conservation and parks and health for not having “effective processes and systems in place” to oversee non-municipal water systems and educate their users.
As a reminder of the risks, her report noted the Walkerton water crisis 25 years ago that killed seven people, resulted in 65 hospitalizations and more than 2,300 cases of gastrointestinal illness after heavy rain washed cow manure into a groundwater well and contaminated the town’s water supply.
An inquiry found the system had been poorly operated for years, was inadequately tested and not properly chlorinated.
Citing one example of a potential problem, the report pointed to a system providing water to an unnamed community college serving 2,500 people that “had not been inspected in seven years.”
Less than one-third of Ontarians who rely on private wells tested their water in the last 12 months.
An average of about 200,000 samples have been submitted for testing annually over the last 20 years, with bacterial contamination found in 35 per cent of samples — roughly 62,500 a year.
Of those, two-thirds found “more serious contamination” such as E. coli bacteria or evidence of actual fecal contamination in the sample,” the report said.
“For this level of contamination, Public Health Ontario advises the well users that the drinking water may be considered unsafe to drink.”
Public Health Ontario modelling from 2016, for example, suggested various levels of contamination in water resulted in 9,600 emergency room visits, 1,100 hospitalizations and 30 deaths that could have been prevented
