Keep more seniors at home, group urges
Advocacy group wants wage parity for home-care workers
Aprovincial home-care advocacy group is urging the Ontario government to dedicate more resources to keeping vulnerable seniors out of institutions in the wake of devastating COVID-19 outbreaks at long-termcare homes across the province that have claimed the lives of almost 2,000 people.
Home Care Ontario is set to submit its pre-budget recommendations to the Ontario government today. It provided a copy of the document to the St. Catharines Standard in advance of its public release.
Chief executive officer Sue VanderBent said the pandemic has “shone a spotlight on how quickly the (health-care) system can start to stumble.”
Now, as the second wave of the pandemic virus is leading to increased COVID-19 outbreaks at long-term-care homes across Ontario, she said the provincial government “cannot afford for it to stumble at all.”
To prevent that from happening, she said the province must invest in developing a more robust home-care system that offers people enhanced medical care in the safety and comfort of their own homes.
“These services are here to help people, but we need to grow it and make it more robust, and that’s our message,” VanderBent said.
The document, called “Staying Home and Staying Healthy: Home Care in the Time of COVID-19 and Beyond,” includes recommendations calling for wage parity between homecare and other health-care workers; moving more patients out of hospitals into a homecare setting to enhance surge capacity; and creating a tax credit of up to $1,500 to reimburse people who pay out of pocket for home-care service annually.
VanderBent said wage parity in all health-care settings would entice more care providers such as personal support workers, registered practical nurses, registered nurses and therapists to choose to work in a home-care setting, rather than opting to work in long-termcare homes or hospitals where they get paid significantly more.
It would address a long-standing shortage of medical professionals working in the homecare field, she added.
“I think it’s about not understanding the work and the complexity of care at home. It’s very complex, it’s very high end. We’re not doing brain surgery, obviously, we’re not doing acute care, but we are certainly looking after people very shortly after acute care and who have serious chronic co-morbid conditions that could end up back in the hospital,” she said.
Moving more alternative level of care patients out of hospitals and into home-care settings would help ensure hospitals are able to maintain a capacity of at least 10 per cent for acute-care patients, while also helping hospitals address their backlog of 148,000 elective surgeries that were delayed as a result of the pandemic.
She said a recent national study has shown one in five alternative level of care patients could be safely cared for in their homes, which would free up hospital beds while also keeping vulnerable people out of institutional settings prone to COVID-19 outbreaks.
A home-care tax credit, VanderBent said, would assist many of the roughly 150,000 Ontario residents who purchase more than 20 million hours of family-funded home care each year.
VanderBent said most people paying out of pocket for services are also receiving government funded care, “but it’s not enough.” As a result, she said, people are forced to either do without or pay to supplement the care they’re receiving.
The report quotes a 2015 study that showed 63 per cent of Canadians say they cannot afford the cost of paying for the care elderly family members need to remain in their homes.
The organization suggests reimbursing 15 per cent of home care costs up to $10,000 per year, which would provide a maximum annual credit of up to $1,500.