Ottawa Citizen

MPP says everyone has role to play in end of life care

- ANDREW DUFFY

Ottawa South MPP John Fraser had an eye-opening message for an Algonquin College breakfast gathering Friday that brought together some of the region’s most important health care executives.

“We’re all going to die,” Fraser told the audience. “We’re all related to people who are going to die. We’re all going to have friends who are going to die.”

As parliament­ary assistant to Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins, Fraser has been handed the job of developing a comprehens­ive palliative care strategy for the province and overseeing the expansion of hospice care. The government wants to open 20 new residentia­l hospices in Ontario.

He told Friday’s breakfast meeting — held as part of Algonquin’s Future of Health and Wellness Speaker Series — that since “we are all in this together,” places like Ottawa have to keep pushing for community-based solutions to the challenges posed by end of life care.

“We have to as a community come together to build what we need to make sure that people have a dignified exit and have access to quality palliative care and pain management,” he said. “Palliative care is a great community-building exercise because it’s something that touches everybody.”

Fraser said a critical part of any palliative care strategy must be education. Family members need to make time to talk about what they want to happen at the end of their lives, he said, and government has to do a better job of presenting people with quality options that allow them to die with dignity in their homes, in hospices or in hospitals.

“Too often,” he said, “patients and their families don’t know the treatment options that are available to them. That has to change.”

The vast majority of people want to die at home, he noted, yet most don’t know what that involves or how to access the community resources that could help them.

When his own father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2013, he said, family members took turns spending nights with him for six months before he was moved in his final days to the May Court Hospice for pain control.

“It was a very difficult and beautiful time,” he said.

In Ottawa, May Court is one of two residentia­l hospices operated by Hospice Care Ottawa. The registered charity receives provincial support to operate 19 beds, but must still raise more than $2 million to cover its annual expenses.

The charity expects to begin building a new residentia­l facility in Kanata, the Ruddy-Shenkman Hospice, in April; it is also seeking funding for a new hospice in Orléans to serve the city’s Frenchspea­king population.

Lisa Sullivan, executive director of Hospice Care Ottawa, said studies show a city needs about 10 hospice beds for every 100,000 residents, which suggests that Ottawa remains underserve­d.

“We always have a waiting list,” she said. “Our goal is to get 40 to 50 beds in the city in the next five years and we’re hoping that some funding from the Ministry of Health will come through that allows us to do that.”

It costs about $460 to care for a patient in a hospice bed versus about $1,100 a day in a hospital.

The number of Ontarians over the age of 85 is growing. Between 2006 and 2011, it was the fastest growing segment of the population, increasing by 29 per cent.

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John Fraser

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