Home support funding fairness

Nova Scotians with disabilities who need enhanced home support should not be arbitrarily divided into haves and have nots.

But that’s essentially what a provincial funding cap on enhanced family support in the province’s disability support program had been doing, until this week.

So we welcome Wednesday’s announcement by the Department of Community Services that that funding cap was being terminated, effective immediately.

The cap had created a waiting list of adults and children deemed eligible for enhanced home support who couldn’t get it due to funding for the program being maxed out.

The change means 18 people, including five children, who’d been on the wait list can now get up to $1,600 a month in extra funding to augment the base amount — for families who meet income eligibility rules — of up to $2,200 a month for respite services.

As Autism Nova Scotia’s executive director Cynthia Carroll told Herald multimedia journalist John McPhee, “historically families who needed that support but couldn’t access it would potentially be at risk for crisis.”

That could result in some people with disabilities being unable to continue living at home and having to be placed in another setting, she said.

It’ll cost at least $350,000 this fiscal year, but it was the right thing to do.

The same principle should have been applied in another case.

A Nova Scotia Human Rights inquiry this week heard that inaction by the Department of Community Services kept a woman with intellectual disabilities in a psychiatric hospital for well over a decade — despite the fact medical staff and social workers repeatedly deemed her ready to leave — because the province said there were no appropriate care homes for her.

Beth MacLean’s plight came to light during the hearing to determine if she and another person should be allowed to leave hospital-like settings despite the province arguing it had no suitable places for them to go.

Again, provincial funding — or lack of it — should not be an excuse used to treat some people with disabilities vastly differently than others.

In this latter case, it’s inexusable such people would be unnecessarily kept in a psychiatric hospital (the Nova Scotia Hospital in Dartmouth) for budgetary reasons.

Clearly, provincial budgets are not infinite. But basic fairness, i.e., treating people in similar circumstances in a even-handed way, must be a priority.