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Ending private long-term care would be an expensive mistake

Monday, February 1st, 2021

Rather than wasting money in buying back licences, we should be investing those funds in urgently redeveloping older homes, increasing home inspections, providing higher wages for more full-time providers and increasing hours of care. We should also be investing in home-care that keeps seniors independent rather than requiring admission to LTC.

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Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »

Understanding Ontario’s long-term care tragedy

Tuesday, November 24th, 2020

The problem is not the ownership model of LTC homes. The major oversights that led to this tragedy were a failure to proactively test asymptomatic LTC workers and a failure of successive governments to approve redevelopment in homes with multi-residential rooms. Blaming other causes is specious and does not honour the memories of the Ontarians whose lives have been lost to this terrible pandemic.

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Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »

Adopting a U.S. plan for easing hallway medicine

Wednesday, February 26th, 2020

There is no hallway medicine in America in part because of skilled nursing facilities (SNF’s), which are designed to rehabilitate frail seniors after an acute hospital stay and reduce the need for ALC designation. SNF’s employ nurses, support workers, physios and physio assistants to provide care that emphasizes reconditioning weakened seniors after their acute hospital stays… This solution would be more cost effective than maintaining deconditioned patients in acute hospitals or waiting to build long-term care beds.

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The elimination of regional leadership in Ontario’s health system

Wednesday, November 27th, 2019

The health team design principles suggest that regional leadership of the system is not important if local care is better integrated. This may be true but having experience in working with the LHINs to implement change in Ontario, I worry about the loss of a regional leadership structure, which demonstrably improved quality in Ontario health care.

Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »

Are Ontario Health Teams designed for failure?

Wednesday, September 4th, 2019

The ministry has left it to the teams to describe how OHT’s will plan and decide on regional service delivery. There is no requirement for community or patient/family engagement in service planning… Rather than community integration led by public demand for services in mental health or community care, OHT’s seem at risk for becoming hospital-driven organizations, where the strength of the hospital board governs decisions in the region.

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Ontario health quality will suffer under the Peoples Health Act

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2019

The board of Ontario Health seems to think that only front-line workers are needed to provide health care and the back-office staff responsible for measuring and comparing quality as well as holding clinical programs accountable for high quality results can be disposed of. It is naïve to think that busy clinicians can both provide care and do the data collection and analysis that quality improvement requires without back office support.

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Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »

Is it too late to reconsider Ontario’s new health care super agency?

Thursday, February 28th, 2019

… the government will create a super agency called Ontario Health, which will become the single point of accountability for all health services in the province… It seems our ministry is forecasting several years of turgid inertia while Ontario Health and Ontario Health Teams organize their new structures… Massive new bureaucracy, maintenance of old bureaucracy and a low rules environment where we will design the future of Ontario health systems “on the fly.”

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Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »

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