When Evelyn Tenenbaum was discharged from hospital after back surgery, she assumed she would get home care.After all, her neurosurgeon had assured her she would, and that’s what her discharge papers from Sunnybrook Health Science Centre called for.
But for six days following the Feb. 12 surgery, no one came to help Tenenbaum, who had just had two vertebrae removed and another shaved to relieve pressure on her spine.
Tenenbaum, a widow in her 70s who lives alone in a Thornhill condo, says she didn’t eat for the first two days. She was in bed, on morphine, and just getting up to go to the bathroom was excruciatingly painful.
“I could hardly move. It was awful,” she says.
“I needed someone to help me go to the bathroom, to bring me some food, to bring me a drink.” She didn’t have a shower for more than a week.
NDP MPP France Gelinas, her party’s health critic, says Tenenbaum’s experience reflects a big problem in Ontario’s health system.
“It’s a good example of how the system fails. It happens all the time. It’s symptomatic of a bigger issue. Home care is broken,” she charges.
The provincial government maintains that beefing up home care is a priority as more services move out of hospitals and into the community.
“While I can’t speak to any specific case, I can say that our government recognizes the need for more home care. That’s why, despite our fiscal challenges, we’re increasing access to home care. This is certainly one area of common ground with the NDP,” Health Minister Deb Matthews said.
Ontario hospitals are downsizing, and as they do, they discharge patients “sicker and quicker.” The home-care and community-care sectors are supposed to pick up the slack, but, as in Tenenbaum’s case, that doesn’t always work as seamlessly as it should.
From her bed, Tenenbaum tried calling the Central Community Care Access Centre, which co-ordinates home care in her area.
“I had to keep calling. I spoke to six people. They had no record of anything, and they kept saying they were going to call me back,” she recounts.
Initially, she says, she was refused government-funded home care altogether.
“They said, ‘You are not eligible to get any help from us.’ I don’t fall within their guidelines,” she says.
“They said they could arrange for someone to shower me if I paid for it.”
So six days after her surgery, a personal support worker arrived to help her shower, a service for which she was charged $30.
Tenenbaum called her local MPP, Conservative Peter Sherman, to complain, and on the seventh day following surgery, a CCAC care co-ordinator showed up at her home to do an intake interview. In the subsequent week, she received two government-funded visits from personal support workers, who helped her shower and change her bedding.
“The only way I got help was by calling my MPP,” Tenenbaum charges. “It sucks, the whole system sucks.”
It’s not entirely clear why Tenenbaum didn’t get immediate home care. Health-care organizations are restricted in what they can say about patients.
Says hospital spokesperson Craig Duhamel: “We sent along the referral for home care to CCAC (the community care access centre) prior to discharge. To clarify, CCAC co-ordinates home care, not the hospital. If a patient is able to be discharged, we send them home to await home care.”
Says CCAC spokesperson Lynn Harrett: “Physician referrals are normally handled through the hospital …. Even if we didn’t get a hospital referral, people can call back to the hospital, get ahold of the CCAC in the hospital, get ahold of the CCAC in their community, and we would recognize that as a post-hospital care need.”
Every day of the current legislative session, which began Feb. 20, NDP members have asked a question about home care — an issue on top of their political agenda.
“The system is not reliable … . Sometimes the services are there, sometimes they are not,” says Gelinas, adding that some people have had to wait up to 260 days for home care.
Matthews said the CCACs work “diligently” to provide the right care, and the province is looking to increase its investment. However, “Cases like these show we can and must do better.”
Waits vary across the province, Gelinas notes. They differ according to which of 14 CCACs serves you, who makes the order for home care, and even the business cycles of the CCACs, which are sometimes force to extend wait times to make their budgets stretch, Gelinas says.
She says patients like Tenenbaum should not be discharged form hospital if their home care is not arranged.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Theresa Boyle
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