Home care pitched as solution to hospital overcrowding problem

With Premier Doug Ford preparing to shake up Ontario's health system and promising to tackle hospital overcrowding, home care providers see an opportunity.

The umbrella group Home Care Ontario will launch a campaign Thursday called "End Hallway Healthcare." The group of for-profit and non-profit agencies will pitch home care as an affordable solution to the province's chronically overstretched supply of hospital beds.

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The providers argue that spending more on publicly-funded home care can help reduce the need for hospital admissions and help patients who are admitted get out of acute care more quickly.

"If we gave more anticipatory home care and more protective home care that prevented people from having to go into the hospital or the [emergency room]in a situation where they didn't need to, we could reduce a lot of health care costs," said Sue Vanderbent, CEO of Home Care Ontario, in an interview Wednesday.

"People recover better at home, so the faster we can get people home, the better," said Vanderbent. "We need to have a robust home care system to be able to do that."

On any given day, some 4,000patients in Ontario hospitals don't actually require an acute-care bed. Many of those are waiting for a spot in long-term care or home-care services.

Many officials in the health sector believe those "alternate level of care" patients are at the root of the hallway medicine problem, and boosting home care is at least part of the answer.

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"They could be recovering in the comfort of their own home if only they had access to a professional home careworker. We need to bring more care out of the hallway and into the home," says Home Care Ontario'sadvocacywebsite, which will urge people to contact their MPPs.

The home-care providers believe Ford's PC government, in its drive to cut costs, will be interested in shifting spending from pricey hospital rooms to far cheaper home care.

"I think it aligns pretty well with what Premier Ford is talking about," said Vanderbent.

In its pre-budget submission presented last month, Home Care Ontario asked the government to inject an extra$600 million into home care. That would be a 20 per cent jump in the current annual home care budgetof $3 billion.

Home care is on the radar of a panel of experts that Ford appointed to look into the problem. Known as the Premier's Councilof Improving Healthcare and Ending Hallway Medicine, the experts said some people are spending more days in hospital than they need to because they can't access other options for health care.

"There is insufficient capacity in community care systems like home care and mental health and addictions care to prevent people from needing to go to hospital and to enable them to return home from hospital quickly," says the council's first report, submitted two weeks ago.

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It's far from the first time that home care agencies have pitched themselves as the answer to what ails the health system.

Home Care Ontario alsoasked the Wynne government last year to boost funding to the sector by $600 million. The home-care budget was increased, but only by $180 million. That provided an extra 2.8million hours of personal support and 284,000 more nursing visits.

Critics say simply spending muchmore money on home care is not a cure-all. They say better integration of home-care services with hospitals and family doctors is essential to making any improvements.

More than 700,000 Ontarians receive publicly-funded home care each year. Home care takes up about five per cent of the overall health budget of $60 billion.