Yesterday we looked at the challenge of CCACs is managing scarcity amid too few available nursing home beds in the province.
One of the ways of placing a client into the nursing home faster – albeit with a three-month median wait – is to declare them a crisis priority.
The Long Term Care Act specifically requires that crisis clients be prioritized on the basis of urgency of need, but the question is whose need?
The Auditor General of Ontario (AG) looked at this issue and revealed there are many ways in which an individual can become a crisis priority, including simply taking up space in a hospital that has itself been declared “in crisis.”
“All patients waiting for a LTC home in this particular hospital are generally given crisis priority,” the AG’s annual report states. In fact, on a four level scale, these patients would rank number one.
OPSEU Diablogue 