Forcing hospital patients down the highway and into a retirement home. This is the solution?

The proposed medium term remedy for the Windsor Essex hospital bed crisis is to open 62 interim long term care beds at a Leamington retirement home next month. The Leamington Court home is reportedly part of Allegro Residences, which, in turn, is part of the Maestro Group, which is based in Montreal and operates residences across the country with a staff of 2,500.

This, of course, raises the issue of shipping public hospital patients off to retirement homes -- homes which are overwhelmingly run on a for-profit basis. Serious questions have been raised about the quality of care for hospital patients at retirement homes.

And in Windsor, doubt is also being raised about the wisdom of shipping hospital patients miles away. Any forced movement of hospital patients can have a serious health impact. But there is also concern that shipping Windsor seniors miles down the road to Leamington will leave them isolated from their loved ones and put more strain on families.

"I think this will be a lot of trouble for people from Windsor. If they only have an elderly spouse and no family members to drive the spouse back and forth, how will they visit?" said David Wonham, a retired physician who's working with Windsor Regional Hospital as an adviser. "It's very distressing to me."

Patients who don't accept the first available "LTC" bed will face a $600-per-day fee to remain at the hospital.

The LHIN CEO, Gary Switzer, has acknowledged the move will be difficult for some seniors and said the LHIN is looking into transportation arrangements for family members.

Another possibility is housing some seniors in Windsor Regional Hospital's new complex continuing care unit, which has room for 20 extra beds. But that would depend on funding from the province.

dallan@cupe.ca

Comments

Huge cuts in public sector wages predicted

The Ontario Financial Accountability Office (FAO) says that, with inflation, real wages in the public sector will decline 11.3% over the three year period 2021/2 - 2023/4 . This would radically deepen the trend towards lower wages during the last ten years. The FAO reports that since 2011, the average annual salary for the Ontario public sector employees (defined here as employees of schools, colleges, provincial government, provincial agencies, and hospitals) has increased by $10,385 -- or 1.6 per cent on average annually. This is the lowest increase of all the sectors and lower than inflation, which averaged 1.8 per cent per year. Over the ten years that would be about a 2% pay cut. The FAO reports that wage settlements were the lowest in the provincial public sector over the last decade: Hospital Wages Especially Challenged: The FAO predicts hospital wages will increase even less than in the public sector -- just ...

Are health care administrative expenses out of control in Ontario?

The Progressive Conservative government has justified its health restructuring plans with the claim that administrative expenses are much higher in Ontario than in Canada. When introducing the reforms, health minister Christine Elliott claimed , “Over the last five years, Ontario has spent 30% more than the Canadian average in administrative expenses on its health care system.” Elliott did not indicate her source of information. Presumably, however, the Progressive Conservatives are referring to the CIHI simplified and user friendly “ Your Health System ” graphs. Those graphs show “administrative expenses” in Ontario at 5.8% in Ontario while it is 4.5% in Canada. This CIHI measure is actually fairly narrowly defined. It is the percentage of “the legal entity’s” total expenses associated with the administrative, finance, human resources and communications functional centres. However “the legal entity” used for this estimate is [1] only...

Too many public sector workers in Ontario?

Opponents of public services often try to portray the public sector as having grown disproportionately. In fact, since 1976, the number of public sector employees has not quite kept pace with the population. In 1976, the number of public sector employees in Ontario as reported by Statistics Canada averaged 830,800. By 2012, the number had increased to 1,330,700 -- a 60.2% increase. That sounds like significant growth -- true. But the population has increased from 8,413,779 in 1976 to 13,505,900 in 2012, a 60.5% increase. In other words, population growth has run slightly ahead of the growth in public sector employment. In 1976, close to 10% of the population worked in the public sector. It stayed pretty much this way until the Mike Harris government came to power when it dipped below 9%. It returned close to the historical range in the last six years or so, declining in 2012 to below the 1976 averag...

Defend Public Healthcare

Search This Blog