Ontario's auditor general says nearly 70,000 patients - or six in every 100 - are injured while receiving care in Ontario's hospitals each year and called for immediate government action to help reduce that number.
The findings come in Bonnie Lysyk's annual report, released Wednesday at Ontario's legislature.
Lysyk said her team's audits of acute-care centees found six in every 100 patients treated and discharged from provincial hospitals were harmed during care.
She said each year, Ontario hospitals discharge 1 million people. Of those, about 67,000 suffered some kind of harm during their hospital stay.
The audit found hospitals are currently not required to report so-called "never-events," such as leaving a foreign object inside a patient, to the Ministry of Health.
Lysyk said her team visited six of the 13 hospitals that track "never-events" and found 214 such incidents had occurred since 2015.
