Home care touted as solution to ALC crisis

John Lindsay said if there’s any solution to Sudbury’s alternate level of care (ALC) crisis, it would be the government putting more resources into home care.

“Do (ALC patients) really require intensive in-hospital or nursing home care?” Lindsay, a seniors advocate and chair of Friendly to Seniors Sudbury, asked. “Would these people be able to stay in their homes if they had some form of care from people (coming into their homes)?”

Lindsay was one of the speakers at a forum on ALC held at the Quality Inn Oct. 23. ALC patients are those who no longer need care in an acute hospital setting, but cannot find care within the community.

The forum, which was attended by about 100 people, was sponsored by Friendly to Seniors Sudbury, the United Way, the Quality Care Alliance and the Sudbury Women’s Centre.

Caring for patients in the hospital costs about $1,000 a day, and caring for them in a nursing home costs about $200 a day, Lindsay said. Providing seniors with a few hours of care per day in their own homes adds up to a fraction of the cost, he said.

“That’s where we can recognize some significant savings,” Lindsay said. “We can’t go on the way we are now, spending more and more money to put people in these institutions when they could possibly stay in their own homes at a vastly reduced cost.”

He said the government has been caught “rather flat-footed” by the ALC crisis. Money was taken away from the home care system, and now the government is seeing that the service is sorely needed, Lindsay said.

With the opening of the one-site hospital, Sudburians now have access to less beds because the new facility was built without capacity for ALC patients. Lindsay said the community is “very frustrated” with the situation.

He said he thinks the temporary ALC facility at the hospital’s former Memorial site is a “stop-gap” measure for the problem, although it’s better than nothing.

“I’ve been a patient at Memorial, and I know the facilities at the other long-term care residences are somewhat equal,” he said.

“Really, if you are in extremely poor condition, sometimes the accommodations you’re put into are adequate, even though they might not be desirable for someone who is not in that...condition.”

Sharleen Stewart, one of the representatives of the Quality Care Alliance who attended the ALC forum, said the personal support workers (PSWs) who provide home care aren’t being treated fairly.

The Quality Care Alliance is a province-wide organization made up of community, faith, senior and rights-based groups working towards better care for seniors and those with disabilities, as well as better working conditions for health care workers.

Stewart, the president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents 7,000 PSWs in the province, said PSWs aren’t compensated adequately for the time they spend travelling in between clients’ homes.

“The result of that is you’re seeing a shortage in PSWs,” she said.

“People looking at working in the health care professions are not looking at home care or becoming a PSW as a profession because of that issue of having to subsidize their own income.”

Ernie Checkeris was one of those who attended the forum. He said he showed up at the event because he’s “curious” about the ALC issue.

He said he thinks part of the solution may be to have low-cost assisted housing “for people who have outlived their own homes. I think the city should encourage that kind of thing to be built.”

Checkeris said he thinks the ALC crisis is a “horrific” problem.

“The hospital should be able to accommodate a person coming into the emergency room as quickly as possible,” he said. “That’s why it’s called the emergency (room).”

He said he spent five hours lying on a stretcher in the hallway outside the emergency room as he waited to have doctors deal with bleeding around his knee replacement.

“We have a brand new hospital that’s taken something like 10 or 14 years (to complete), and it’s not sufficient for crying out loud.”

Rachel Proulx, who lives with multiple sclerosis and uses an electric wheelchair to get around, also attended the event.

She said the issue of society finding the resources to care for both seniors and those with disabilities is a “serious problem.” With the aging population, more and more people are going to need services such as home care, Proulx said.

“Disability increases with age,” she said. “I’ll (soon) be part of that majority of those people who need services...Let’s get our act together, and let’s get these services.”