The report indicates that safety problems persisted in Ontario that were not necessarily preventable. However, more could have been done to protect the health-care workers who were involved.
The SARS outbreak caused 275 people to catch the virus. Of these, 44 people died from SARS during the crisis in the Toronto area (including one doctor and two nurses). In fact, forty-five percent of the people who caught the virus in the hospitals in Ontario were health-care workers.
The report indicated that hospitals are as dangerous as mines and factories for their workers.
The report recommendations indicate that changes must be made to allow the Ontario Ministry of Labour to be involved in any future health care crises. The Ontario Ministry of Labour was basically sidelined during the outbreaks. The report stated that the ministry should play a lead role in future outbreaks of infectious disease.
According to a report from Canada's CBC News, "Justice Campbell found that systemic problems ran through every hospital and every government agency," said Doug Hunt, chief counsel for the commission.
Vancouver, British Columbia had a SARS case in the early days of the global outbreak before the disease had been named. However, advance planning with the strength of their systems, along with good luck in Vancouver's management response was effective in containing the outbreak, unlike the response in the Toronto area.
The report found that the emergency infrastructure of the province is decaying and being neglected. Cited problems included poor communications, preparation, planning, accountability, safety of workers and patients, lack of resources, and infectious control, surveillance and inspections.
Accoridng to the report, the most important cited problem is a lack of applying precautionary measures without waiting for scientific evidence.
The report states that Ontario residents are safer now than before, but they are still not as safe as they should be yet. The report provides many changes to the entire system to improve the safety for everyone.
Hunt stated that residents of Ontario need to make demands on the government to enact the recommendations as outlined in the report
Hunt said, "I think Justice Campbell really wants to give the citizens of Ontario a wake-up call that we all have to...put pressure on the government to make sure that it takes steps in order to rectify the problems."
One critic of the report, Dr. Richard Schabas, former chief medical officer of health for the province who is now chief of staff of York Central Hospital, north of Toronto, stated that the conventional view in the report that SARS was a grave threat to the world is wrong.
Schabas said, "It [SARS] was not a highly infectious disease. It was capable of very limited spread in very limited circumstances, and the disease itself died out within a matter of months."
