Home care hours cut 15 minutes by province

Some Albertans receiving home care are beginning to see their hours of service reduced as Alberta Health Services struggles to accommodate a growing list of patients, the agency said on Monday.

While the NDP accused the health authority of a 10 per cent, across-the-board cut in the home care budget, AHS said it was instead trying to make existing funding stretch further to serve more people.

“This is about cutting hours, not cutting service. We will not compromise service and we won’t compromise quality,” said Marianne Stewart, vicepresident of community and mental health for the Edmonton zone.

“This is so we can put the next home-care client on our list and get them service, as opposed to making them wait or making them sit in hospital.”

Stewart said the demand for home care has grown, in part, due to better hospital practices that have allowed patients to leave their acutecare beds more quickly.

AHS knew many of these patients would need followup care at home, such as help taking medication or getting dressed, so the authority increased its home-care budget over the past two years by $95 million to a total of $500 million, she said.

But even this increase, which has allowed 5,000 more patients to receive care, turned out to be insufficient, she said.

“We were getting more efficient with our processes of identifying people in hospital and very quickly getting them home,” Stewart said. “So it’s the right thing to do, but then it’s like ‘Oops, wait a minute, we’re getting ourselves in trouble here, we’re spending more than we have for home care’.”

She said the home-care system works in 15-minute increments, regardless of what service is offered. For example, she said assisting with medication typically takes two minutes, while helping a patient put on stockings takes eight — yet both are allotted a quarter of an hour.

That means there is extra time that can be cut while still providing a patient with all the services they need, Stewart said.

She said AHS is evaluating each patient’s file to determine if a small cut in time, no more than 15 minutes, can be accommodated. Those cuts will allow others to have an increase in time, while some patients will receive home care for the first time.

One patient who has already received a reduction in home-care hours is Cathy Taylor, a lawyer who has severe asthma, sinusitis and muscular dystrophy.

Taylor, who appeared at a news conference with NDP Leader Brian Mason on Monday, said she requires a range of services each morning that are difficult to pack into 90 minutes. She was informed two weeks ago that her time has been reduced to 75 minutes.

The caregivers get Taylor up in the morning, help her to the bathroom, help get her dressed, make breakfast, and then assist with her medication and cleaning procedures.

“I have to take all my medicine with my food. I take all my inhalers ... everything is timed and very sequential,” Taylor said.

“I have to make sure all that medicine and all those procedures get done or I will be sick. That 15 minutes makes a difference, and if I have a caregiver who hasn’t been doing my routine and doesn’t know it cold, it’s impossible to do in an hour and a half.”

Taylor said the level of home care she currently receives allows her to live somewhat independently. “It’s everything to me. I have my own home. I live like my friends live. I can entertain. I am a human being.”

Mason said he believes the reduction in time for people like Taylor is actually part of a 10 per cent budget cut to home care, rather than AHS trying to spread its resources around to more patients.

He said homecare providers have been told to reduce their overall hours of work, as the Redford government has been looking for in-year savings to whittle down a projected $3-billion provincial deficit.

However, none of those providers will speak publicly out of fear of losing government contracts, he said.

“Only in Alberta would a cut like this be made without any formal announcement, and everybody is afraid to talk about it,” Mason said.

I have my own home. I live like my friends live CATHY TAYLOR