Tag Archives: Erie St. Clair CCAC

New minister, same tired denials about cuts

Posted on November 25, 2014 | Leave a comment
Photograph of Ontario Health Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins speaking at the Ontario Hospital Association annual conference.

Dr. Eric Hoskin, Ontario’s Health Minister, speaks about his top four priorities at HealthAchieve November 5.

Dr. Eric Hoskins may be signing his name, but the latest Toronto Star letter-to-the-editor from the Health Minister sounds as tired and exasperated as those served up by his predecessor. Given Ministers seldom pen their own letters, we conclude it must be hard to get good help these days.

Hoskins (or his ghost writer) insists that Star columnist Bob Hepburn is wrong – that in fact no cuts are taking place in home care. Never mind Erie St. Clair CCAC’s new executive director sent out a memo announcing a 33 per cent cut in daily nursing visits or that Care Coordinators at the Champlain CCAC are beside themselves having to recommend out-of-pocket paid alternatives to long-term patients who suddenly find themselves without a caregiver. Both CCACs are staring down millions in debt and are in freefall. But hey, aren’t we glad that no cuts are taking place?

It’s the same old song and dance coming out of the Minister’s office. Hoskins insists that Windsor got $3 million more in funding this year and that overall $270 million has been added for home care. Demand is far outstripping this funding due to a planned multi-year freeze to the base budget of Ontario’s public hospitals. Care Coordinators are telling us that not only is this placing the CCACs under great pressure, but it is changing the very nature of the work they are doing. It’s all about post-hospital care, not about longer-term chronic care management and support.

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Are health services really shifting, or is the health minister being shifty?

Posted on December 6, 2012 | 1 comment
OPSEU's Rick Janson joins OHC Director Natalie Mehra for the release of the coalition's "Austerity Index."

OPSEU’s Rick Janson joins OHC Director Natalie Mehra for the release of the coalition’s “Austerity Index.”

We can all relax now. All those hospital cuts we’ve witnessed recently – Health Minister Deb Matthews says they are not happening.

She says these services are instead being shifted. Evidently we are all fools for not realizing that the 22 beds cut at the Chatham Kent Health Alliance just represent a transfer of services to entities like the Erie-St.Clair Community Care Access Centre, which is itself cutting $8-$10 million after the LHIN refused to allow them to run a $5.2 million deficit.

Hamilton Health Sciences says $25 million in cuts are planned and expects 140 jobs will be impacted. Perhaps Ms. Matthews can tell us where these 140 jobs are re-emerging in the Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant LHIN? And while she’s at it, where did the LHIN reallocate the 69 beds the Niagara Health System cut in the fall of 2011 and spring of 2012? We can’t seem to find them anywhere. Neither can the hospital, which had to cancel or postpone 758 surgeries due to “bed pressures.” Maybe those beds were needed after all.

Perhaps she can tell us where the after-hours clinic, pain clinic, audiology clinic and cardiac rehabilitation program closed by Toronto’s St. Joseph’s Health Centre shifted to? We can’t find them. Can she?

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CCACs not given sufficient resources to deal with “home first” initiative

Posted on December 15, 2011 | 1 comment

The government speaks regularly about moving services out of hospitals and into community-based care, including nursing homes and home care.

They tell us that it is not only more cost-effective, but it is preferred by patients.

So what is the deal with holding the line on CCACs and nursing home beds at a time when the hospitals are being placed under extreme pressure to move alternate level of care patients into the community?

The latest conflict is in Windsor, where the LHIN has refused to give the Community Care Access Centre a waiver to run a $5.2 million deficit.

The CCAC is arguing demand is on the rise and patients will be stranded in hospital if they are unable to provide home care services. Just yesterday Windsor Regional Hospital CEO David Musyj was urging patients to go elsewhere in the anticipated post-Christmas rise in demand for ER services.

No home care. No hospital care. People in the Windsor area must be truly wondering about the direction of their health care.

The CCAC says the overall increase in home care patients is rising by 1,000 to 1,500 per year in Erie St. Clair, and coming out of hospital sooner, these patients are more costly to serve. The cost of the CCACs end-of-life program is rising by 11 per cent per year.

The CCAC is also facing more demand because of delay in the building of a planned 256 bed long-term care home at St. Clair College. They say that delay is costing them $3 million annually.

The LHIN is willing to help out with a one-time grant of $1.5 million while they “study” the needs of the CCAC. In an unusually frank retort, CCAC Executive Director Betty Kutcha told the Windsor Star that “in my view, they’ve got a $1.5 million solution, so they’re trying to fit our problem into that.”

We are hearing that the Home First program – an initiative where hospitals are supposed to discharge patients home to wait for long-term care placement – is increasing overall community referrals to the CCACs by 10 per cent or more. This is a significant strain on their budgets.

Even the Auditor General of Ontario was skeptical in his summer report of the government’s plans to reduce the rate of growth in hospital spending based on service from home care and long-term care where the level of restraint is expected to be even more severe.

When the Health Restructuring Commission of the late 1990s made its recommendations around the transfer of mental health services to community-based agencies, they were adamant that no beds should close until community-based resources were established. The government cut the beds, didn’t provide anywhere near adequate service in the community, and left us with a system that has been the subject of one report after another calling for better.

Are we to repeat the experience as the government pushes hospitals to discharge patients before adequate community resources are put in place?

Seems we never learn.

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Posted in Health System, Home Care, Local Health Integration Networks, Long Term Care

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