‘Transformation’ to take years,
Promise of easier system comes with timeline of three years
Getting medical care in Ontario will become “seamless” under proposed new legislative reforms to erase bureaucratic barriers between hospitals, doctors, home care and dozens of other providers, Health Minister Christine Elliott says.
The promise to make a complicated system easier for patients to navigate came with the acknowledgement from Elliott and senior officials that the “transformation” will take at least three years — coinciding with the next provincial election — and with many details yet to be worked out.
“This is not going to happen overnight,” Elliott said Tuesday at the Bridgepoint rehabilitation hospital, where she announced between 30 and 50 “Ontario Health Teams” will form across the province to better co-ordinate all levels of care.
Each will serve about 300,000 people in a geographic area or a specific group of patients across the province, such as children with fragile medical conditions.
Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government is relying on health-care providers — from hospitals down the line to doctors, home-care agencies, mental-health servicesand more — to devise their own service models meeting provincial standards.
“It will be up to the local health-care providers in each community to come together to form a plan about how they can connect care for patients in their community,” Elliott told a news conference.
In one example to fix what she called a “disconnected” system, patients discharged from hospital needing home care should get it immediately to make sure they don’t end up back in emergency departments with costly and potentially dangerous complications.
During an hour-long technical briefing on the People’s Health Care Act, ministry officials said on background that the new system will probably start with a handful of small, local teams to test what works best before growing bigger, providing valuable lessons for others to follow. Targets for improvement in wait times and care levels will be set. Typically, government background briefings include slide decks and other materials to explain complex changes, but only the framework legislation was provided.
Elliott said reform is needed because 1,200 patients a day typically get treatment in hospital hallways because of overcrowding and 30,000 people are on the waiting list for nursing home beds.
Representing doctors across the province, the Ontario Medical Association agreed change is essential but is awaiting more information.
“The details matter,” president Dr. Nadia Alam said. “The biggest question the OMA has is the ‘how’ of it.” New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath, who raised alarm bells about the pending changes by releasing a leaked copy of draft government legislation last month pointing to the new Ontario Health “super agency,” said she remains skep- tical.
“The minister has not clearly stated there will be no privatization … that’s our biggest worry,” she told reporters before the legislation was introduced.
“A lot of this has been done behind closed doors.”
Ontario Hospital Association president Anthony Dale applauded the new direction, saying different parts of the system don’t co-ordinate care well.
Dr. Joshua Tepper, chief executive of North York General Hospital, said he already holds meetings bi-weekly with family doctors, home-care agencies, a neighbouring nursing home and other providers in the area, with the new Ontario Health Teams looking like an extension of that.
“It’s about getting together and looking at our community and saying ‘what can we collectively do for our patients’ and being given the freedom and the opportunity to do that, removing those gaps that patients experience.”
The risk is that patients will “fall between the cracks” as the system is re-engineered, interim Liberal leader John Fraser warned.
Elliott said “tinkering around the edges” will no longer work in fixing the health-care system and stated publicly funded universal access remains a priority.
It’s not known how many jobs will be lost when administrative functions at the agencies are folded into Health Ontario, but Elliott said any savings will be put into “front-line care.”
Officials said the new Ontario Health Teams will not have headquarters and instead operate using people at various health facilities like hospitals to answer phones and emails to help patients navigate the system with access to their healthcare records.