Tax credits, benefits offset private-care costs

Planning ahead can reduce burden

Like many Gazette readers, I have been following the recent Program 68 horror stories about vulnerable seniors being transferred from one nursing home to another over the course of months and years following discharge from hospital.

As a social worker who was recently employed, albeit briefly, in two local hospitals, I can tell you I was not a fan of Program 68, but I quickly had to learn the written, and unwritten, rules of the game if I was going to help my patients. In time I realized that the only way to avoid the Program 68 runaround was to be proactive in helping families investigate options other than relying on the public system.

It is hard to imagine that Program 68 started out as a positive initiative, but it was originally conceived to free up much needed acute-care hospital beds by expediting the relocation of longterm patients to intermediate nursing-care facilities. Knowing that chronic-care needs would only increase with our aging population, it made sense, on paper, to move people who do not need costly medical treatment to places where they could receive professional care in a residential environment.

But the reality was that it could be years before a bed in a residence of choice opened up and facilities were reluctant to accept new residents who could require more support than the residence was equipped to provide. Thus Program 68 was enacted, in theory, to ensure the patient was rapidly “evaluated” as to their care needs during a temporary placement in order to get the ball rolling if not for a move to the patient’s first residence of choice, at least to their second preference. See http://tinyurl.com/lh5raea for more background.

I soon learned that getting a patient into an evaluation bed varied greatly with their CLSC’s quota of available spaces. Some areas simply did not have enough facilities to accommodate demand, while other communities had spaces to spare. A lot of the dickering was actually done daily by telephone to various agencies and you used whatever it took to get your requests through to the powers that be. It was simply the luck of the draw if a coveted bed suddenly became available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Hence the frantic phone calls to family members at their homes and offices if we thought we could get something, anything, that would get their loved one out of limbo. Needless to say, this is not the way to make important family-care decisions, but I am doubtful Program 68 will get better any time soon.

This is why I urge people to think now about where they want to live if they need the type of daily care only a residence can provide. You already know that getting into a public residence will be onerous, so why not consider going private? Enlist a family member, social worker and/ or no-fee housing consultants such as www.visavie.com/ en/ to investigate the many types of private residences out there ranging from family-type foster homes to large multi-level-care facilities.

Don’t let the costs scare you. There are tax credits and benefits available once you are no longer able to live independently that make both private home care and living in residence much more affordable. Check this Quebec information pamphlet for more information http://tinyurl.com/n595h3a.

We all hope to live independently indefinitely, but we simply don’t know what is waiting for us around the corner. Wouldn’t you rather be the one to choose where you are going to live your last days rather than be “placed” somewhere not of your choosing?