Alternative Level of Care (ALC) is a bureaucratic system term used to describe frail seniors and others needing nursing home placement.
Local hospital and other system officials have been complaining for almost two decades about these people seeking hospital care when they get sick before a nursing home bed is available. And, too many of these patients have been pressured to leave the hospital or pay hospital rates of approximately $1,000 per day.
Officials have repeatedly resorted to the same excuse about our health-care system being invented in the 1950s and not meeting current needs. But that begs the question why in the intervening six decades, did they not take real steps to adapt to changing reality and predictable demographic challenges?
Instead, we hear the familiar refrain that system officials are “meeting” and “discussing.” Mr. Tilleczek says there are “good people around the table that understand it’s a situation that requires the whole system.” Do these people include families and patients and residents who understand it’s a situation that must consider their needs?
He says they are looking at “existing infrastructure in the community” to house people awaiting nursing home placement. We’ve tried that in Sudbury and need to heed the lessons from that failed experiment. When they re-opened the Memorial Hospital site to house sick seniors, it became known by some as the “dog pound for sick old folks.”
Families who lived through that would have much to contribute to the current discussions about using existing infrastructure.
Similarly, it would be helpful to involve families who are now going through something similar in Sault Ste. Marie. There, they re-opened a shuttered, old, sub-standard LTC home as a temporary holding facility for up to 50 hospital patients awaiting LTC placement. We understand these patients are in need of such significant care that ambulance calls to the interim facility have been frequent and a concerning number of those patients died in the past year.
Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, Dr. Eric Hoskins, is working toward an “obsessively patient-centred” health-care system. He has said, “Above all, health and health care is about people. About protecting and promoting the rights of people to support our well-being and in difficult times to ease our pain.”
It is difficult to see how any system discussions will achieve that vision without meaningful involvement of the people who are actually living the realities of our health-care system.
Nancy Johnson
Chair
Northeast Family Councils Network (NEFCN)