What to do with the Community Care Access Centres?
Yesterday’s Toronto Star column by Bob Hepburn suggests we should roll them into the Local Health Integration Networks and send the CCAC CEOs packing. The urge to spank the CCAC board that approved a 50 per cent salary increase for their CEO is compelling, but blowing up the CCACs is likely not the answer.
There is no question that the CCACs are a very cumbersome way to deliver home care. Let’s not forget CCACs also are involved in discharge planning in the hospitals and coordinate placement into long-term care. They are also responsible for the Health Care Connect program that assists Ontarians to find family doctors or nurse practitioners. They directly employ nurses that go into schools to provide mental health support as well as rapid response nurses to assist with chronic disease management. Nurse practitioners are also working with palliative pain and symptom control.
Nobody seems to know how much of their work is taken up by administration. The CCACs say its 10 per cent, but that doesn’t count all the layers at the agency level. We don’t know what the CCAC spends on contract competitions or enforcement to existing home care providers. Let’s face it, accountability is not free.
Hepburn says administration and case management amounts to about 40 per cent, which seems to be as fair a guess as we’ve seen.
By anybody’s standard, that’s not the best bang for the buck.
The problem with the proposed alternative is the CCACs are not really parallel organizations to the LHINs.
OPSEU Diablogue 