Hospital can't turn beds over to retirement home

A Windsor hospital has been officially blocked from setting up hospital beds in a for-profit retirement home.

As noted in June, the Hotel Dieu Hospital was trying to create 18 "assess and restore" hospital beds in a for-profit retirement home in Amhertsburg.

The hitch for the Ministry of Health and LTC wasn't the for-profit nature of the home, it was that the home didn't meet the building and fire code for hospital services. This despite $300,000 in renovations by the retirement home and nine months of planning. For the hospital project, the retirement home installed wheelchair-accessible bathrooms, the flooring was changed from carpet to vinyl, and a nursing station, common room and dining room were built.

Apparently, the relatively new retirement home was built to a different building code than that required for hospitals and so cannot house hospital patients.

The Ontario government has practically made moving work out of hospitals a new religion -- but this problem may slow them down a little bit.

While most retirement homes are for-profit, the Ministry says retirement homes are encouraged to find “alternative ways” to provide services in the community. A Ministry spokesperson told the Windsor Star that transitional care beds are much more specialized than those traditionally found in a retirement home setting, so extensive planning might be required to meet building and fire code requirements.

So it seems!

The Hotel Dieu is now going to open the 18 beds in the hospital itself. The 18 beds were part of 33 beds designed to help Windsor deal with its longstanding bed crisis (which in itself was made worse by the earlier failure of a for-profit nursing home project). The other 15 beds had already been established in the Dieu. (It is not clear why the hospital did not simply put all 33 beds in the Dieu in the first place.)

The hospital is working on a settlement with the retirement home for the costs incurred.

Comments

More spending on new hospitals and new beds? Nope

Hospital funding: There is something off about the provincial government's Budget claims on hospital capital funding (funding to build and renovate hospital beds and facilities). For what it is worth (which is not that much, given the long time frame the government cites), the province claims it will increase hospital capital spending over the next 10 years from $11 billion to $20 billion – or on average to about $2 billion per year. But, this is just a notional increase from the previous announcement of future hospital capital spending. Moreover, even if we did take this as a serious promise and not just a wisp of smoke, the government's own reports shows they have actually funded hospital infrastructure about $3 billion a year over the 2011/12-2015/16 period. So this “increase” is really a decrease from past actual spending. Even last year's (2016-17) hospital capital funding increase was reported in this Budget at $2.3 billion - i.e. about ...

Ford government fails to respond to 72% increase in COVID inpatient days, deepening the capacity crisis

COVID infections continue to drive up hospital costs and inpatient hospitalizations in Ontario. For the most recent fiscal year (April 1, 2022- March 31, 2023) hospital stays related to COVID cost $1.221 billion, according to new CIHI data. This is about 4% of total hospital spending, creating a very significant new cost pressure beyond the usual pressures of population growth, aging, inflation, and rising utilization. Costs for COVID related hospitalizations increased 22.2% in Ontario in 2022/23 from the previous fiscal year, rising from $999 million to $1.221 billion. That rise is particularly notable as the OMICRON spike of late 2021 and early 2022 had passed by the the 2022/23 fiscal year. The $222 million increase in COVID hospitalization costs came in the same year as the Ford government cut special COVID funding and, in fact, cut total hospital funding by $156 million. In total, there were 60,653 COVID hospitalizations...

The hospital crisis: No capacity, no plan, no end

While Canada has achieved universal public healthcare coverage, that does not mean conservative forces have given up trying to erode that coverage and expand corporate care where it does not currently exist. The battle has become particularly intense in Ontario under the Ford Progressive Conservative government, which is implementing serious cuts to the level of care and moving to bring in for-profit mini-hospitals. Inadequate Staﬃng. Less and less of hospital spending is on staff. Employee compensation as a share of hospital expenditures has consistently shrunk in Ontario. This is not some immutable law of hospital development. It is in stark contrast with the rest of Canada, where compensation has become a larger share and now accounts for 67.1%. Hospitals in provinces other than Ontario now have 18 percent more staﬀ per capita than hospitals in Ontario. Overall, if Ontario had the same staﬃng capacity as the other provinces and territories, there would be another...

Defend Public Healthcare

Search This Blog