Home Care Ontario Launches New White Paper to help End Hallway Health Care by Assisting OHTs to Deliver Stronger Care at Home

Stronger Care at Home, Better Health Care for All Ontarians: Recommendations to the New Ontario Health Teams provides recommendations on how to utilize home care to reduce hallway health care in Ontario

TORONTO, Nov. 12, 2019 /CNW/ - Home Care Ontario, the voice of home care in Ontario TM, has released a new white paper providing recommendations to Ontario Health Teams (OHTs) to help them integrate and utilize home care to end hallway health care in Ontario. The report, entitled Stronger Care at Home, Better Care for all Ontarians: Recommendations to the New Ontario Health Teams, outlines a series of recommendations to take the pressure off our overcrowded hospitals while providing more patients and their families with the professional care they need in their own home.

"Hospital overcrowding and increasing wait lists for home care have sadly become a reality that more and more Ontario families are experiencing every day," said Sue VanderBent, CEO, Home Care Ontario. "The good news is that it does not have to be this way. The creation of Ontario Health Teams (OHTs) is a key part of the health care transformation underway, and our report provides them with concrete recommendations as they are getting up and running on how to integrate and utilize home care as a key part of ending hallway healthcare."

Fifteen per cent of Ontario hospital beds are now occupied by patients who no longer require a hospital stay but simply have nowhere else to go for their care. That is an average of 3,000 people, every day, in hospital beds across the province because they cannot get the professional home care services that would allow them to recover in the comfort of their own home.

This new white paper recommends that the new Ontario Health Teams take steps to:

• Expand the types of complex care that home care providers can deliver at home;
• Empower all health care workers in OHTs to provide the best possible care for their patients by giving home care professionals real-time access to their patients' electronic medical records;
• Ensure that hospital and home care social work staff are involved in home care discharge planning with patients and families in order to establish a strong plan for durable patient discharge to the home;
• Make more efficient use of Ontario's home care system by allowing home care providers to be responsible for their own staff scheduling to meet patient needs and achieve good clinical care; and,
• Utilize technology to deliver more care safely at home and provide patients, caregivers and home care teams with greater access to medical tools, information, and inter-disciplinary consultations.

"Ontarians do not need to wait in hallways and accept rationed care. Ontarians do not have to settle for anything less than the high-quality care they deserve," concluded VanderBent. "We have a once in a generation opportunity with OHTs to redesign the health care system in a meaningful way. Implementing these recommendations into the fabric of OHTs will result in both a stronger home care system, and a more robust and sustainable model of patient-centric care."

About Home Care Ontario:

Home Care Ontario, the voice of home care in Ontario^TM, is a member-based organization with a mandate to promote growth and development of the home care sector through advocacy, knowledge transfer, and member service. Home Care Ontario members include those engaged in and/or supportive of home-based health care. In Ontario, service provider organizations are responsible for providing nursing care, home support services, personal care, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, social work, dietetics, speech language therapy, respiratory therapy, infusion pharmacy, and medical equipment and supplies in the home to individuals of all ages. An estimated 58 million hours of publicly and privately purchased home care service is provided annually across the province.

SOURCE Home Care Ontario