Ont. To Unveil Strategy to Reduce Hospital Patients Who Can Receive Home Care

By Maria Babbage, THE CANADIAN PRESS

TORONTO – The province will soon unveil a “comprehensive strategy” to unclog emergency rooms by reducing the number of patients who are taking up hospital beds when they can receive the needed care at home, Health Minister George Smitherman said Wednesday.

Smitherman wouldn’t provide any details, but promised the plan would look at adjusting the level of services that such “alternate level of care” patients can receive at home, such as nursing and homemaking.

“We think that that will be successful in allowing some individuals that are in the hospital to go home, even if for a period of time while they wait for admission to a long-term care bed,” he said after a speech laying out the government’s health-care priorities.

Some cities have had ambulances unable to respond to calls because they’re tied up in emergency rooms with patients who can’t get a bed.

But the government will reveal “innovative” measures in the next few weeks that should help alleviate some of those pressures, Smitherman said.

“You cannot have a good performing emergency room so long as an emergency room doesn’t have beds to admit people,” he said.

“And so creating better flow through the hospital is an extraordinarily big part of our focus, and you’ll see substantive effort on that within two or three weeks.”

Helping the elderly stay in their homes will be crucial in tackling Ontario’s rapidly growing population of seniors, Smitherman told a health-care conference.

It’s part of a government plan to reduce wait times in emergency rooms – one of his top two priorities for health care over the next four years, he said.

Improving access to family health care by providing more family health teams and nurse practitioner-led clinics is also at the top of his agenda, Smitherman added.

But the province is facing a “demographic tsunami” as the number of seniors is expected to double over the next 16 years, he said.

The government will be spending an additional $1.1 billion over the next four years to provide better community services, like Meals on Wheels, that will help the elderly stay in their homes, Smitherman said.

Opposition parties have hammered the Liberals in recent months for failing seniors in nursing homes who they say aren’t getting the care they need.

Critics have complained that the province’s nursing homes are so underfunded that residents must wait hours for meals, are put to bed too early, and are forced to wallow in soiled diapers for hours on end.