Community health services net $23.7M
Adult day programs are among the big winners as the province announced new funding for the local health network.
Three years ago, Judith Frederick and her husband of 40 years were congratulating themselves on their good fortune. Both were healthy, retired from good government jobs — he’d been an assistant deputy minister, she a senior researcher — and money wasn’t a problem.
The following month, their world fell apart. Frederick’s husband, who recently turned 80, had a stroke. Six months later, he was diagnosed with mixed dementia.
“I wasn’t in the caring business,” Frederick said ruefully Friday. “I knew nothing about that.”
But suddenly she was the primary caregiver to her husband, whose memory, motor functions and ability to communicate were all impaired by his illness.
He now walks with a shuffle, spends much of the day snoozing in his chair and is losing the ability to find the right words for common objects. “He calls shoes ‘socks’ on occasion,” said Frederick, who is 11 years younger than her husband.
Like many with dementia, Frederick’s husband is also anxious, suspicious, maddeningly repetitive and very demanding.
“He’s a proud man,” she said. “He’s used to being in control and it’s hard for us both. I have to remind myself that many of his behaviours are beyond his control. It’s not his fault. It’s the disease.”
Even so, there are times when Frederick finds herself responding to her husband with anger and frustration. “Then I know I need to take some time off.”
About a year ago, Frederick was able to get her husband into an adult day program, run by Carefor Health and Community Services, that provides supervised programming for dependent adults, including people with dementia. He spends two days a week there.
That has made a huge difference, Frederick said. “It means that I have some respite during the day. I’m able to get some things done around the house, I’m able to get some quiet time for myself.”
Adult day programs, including Carefor’s, were among the many beneficiaries of $23.7 million in new annual provincial funding for communitybased services in the Champlain LHIN announced Friday by John Fraser, MPP for Ottawa South.
The new funding represents an increase of about six per cent in the LHIN’s current spending on community programs.
It will be distributed to 25 programs serving thousands of seniors, people with mental health conditions, addictions or complex health conditions, and those who need palliative care. Some examples: Adult day programs will get nearly $900,000 — enough to pay for 156 more people every year.
Another $2.7 million will be used to expand assisted-living services for high-risk seniors, allowing 160 more people to receive personal support and homemaking help in their homes on a 24-hour basis.
$621,000 for the First Link program — which helps people newly diagnosed with dementia and their families and caregivers — allowing it to serve an additional 704 people a year.
The Going Home program, which provides at-home services for 10 days to people after they’ve been discharged from hospital, will be able to reach 750 more people thanks to $300,000 in new funding.
There’s evidence that these sorts of community-based initiatives are having a “very positive impact” on this area’s health-care system, said Champlain LHIN CEO Chantale LeClerc.
She credits them for reductions in wait times at hospital emergency departments and the number of patients, mostly seniors, occupying hospital beds while they wait for an alternative level of care.
As well, the regional waiting list for space in a longterm care home has dropped to 2,200 from more than 3,000. “That’s people who now have other options,” LeClerc said.
“We are absolutely making some headway,” she said. “We’re really starting to see an impact at the system level.”
Anecdotally, LeClerc hears stories such as Frederick’s all the time.
“People say, ‘This program that you put in or expanded, I’m actually using it and it’s making a huge difference,’” she said.
Frederick said staff at Carefor’s adult day program provide a “very warm and encouraging” atmosphere. They displayed “the compassion and understanding that both my husband and I needed.”
Carefor’s program, she said, means she’ll be able to take care of her husband longer at home. “He won’t have to go into long-term care as soon as he might have.”