BY HEIDI ULRICHSEN
Sudbury residents waiting for a long-term care bed won?t be sent out of the community for about 10 days surrounding the Christmas and New Year?s
holidays.
The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care made the decision Dec. 2 after meeting with a working group made up of representatives from Sudbury Regional Hospital, the Manitoulin-Sudbury Community Care Access Centre and local long-term care facilities.
?It?s very important that people aren?t being transferred during Christmas...Those emotional ties to family at Christmas are especially important,? says Sudbury Regional Hospital senior vice-president Joe Pilon, who attended the meeting.
Sudbury has been under a crisis 1A designation since April 2004, meaning that people needing a long-term care bed can be transferred to Espanola, Manitoulin Island or Parry Sound.
The ministry has also decided that Sudbury will likely get five more interim long-term care beds sometime in the near future, bringing the total number up to 30.
?The ministry had indicated they were able to get funding for an additional five long-term care beds at Pioneer Manor,? says Pilon.
?They didn?t commit to a date, but they felt it could happen quickly. So I?m assuming it will happen before Christmas.?
The hospital is overflowing with Alternative Level of Care (ALC) patients waiting to be transferred into long-term or convalescent care, which has
severely affected its ability to provide acute care.
The 15 long-term care beds added earlier this fall have made things much better for the hospital, admits Pilon.
But the administrator stresses that this is only a short-term solution to a big problem in our community.
We need to find a way to make sure local long-term care beds are available to everyone who needs them, he says.
?We don?t want to have to send people out of the community, but we also don?t want to have to cancel surgery or have people waiting on stretchers in the emergency room,? he says.
Representatives from the City of Greater Sudbury had a separate meeting with Health and Long-Term Care Minister George Smitherman last week to discuss the long-term care crisis.
Smitherman asked the city to work with community partners, including the hospital, to come up with a made-in-Sudbury plan to solve the problem.
?I?m hoping that the (city led) group will identify the demands for long-term care, and what services are required to meet those demands,? says Pilon.
?We believe that our community is truly under capacity in terms of our long-term care beds, and the supportive care that?s required to keep seniors in
their home.?
