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www.oakvillebeaver.com · OAKVILLE BEAVER Wednesday, June 16, 2010 · 14 Help for ailing seniors overwhelmed by red tape Continued from page 1 neck," said Brenda Poland, a Peel region health promotion officer living in Oakville. While in hospital, Poole experienced seizures and brain hemorrhaging that left her with reduced cognitive and motor skills. "Her doctor said she should not go back to her house," said the daughter. And so began the long wait for long-term care. Verna Poole passed away in early 2010, after finally getting into a Brockville nursing home and spending just over a year there. "She was potentially going to be in the hospital for months until something came available, so what we did find was a retirement home for her," Poland said, explaining that another retirement home refused to take Verna Poole Poole once it learned that seizures had complicated her medical condition. The woman's condition deteriorated rapidly in the retirement home that did take her. She began wearing her clothes backwards and putting her shoes on the wrong feet. She grew increasingly confused, and it was blatantly obvious that a retirementhome bed (at $2,700 a month) was not an appropriate care environment for her. "You could tell that her needs weren't getting met in that type of facility," said Poland. "Once it became obvious she needed something different, that's where it got a bit frustrating knowing it could take longer than we thought." A growing number of vulnerable Ontarians are trying with little success to find what they need in a long-term care system that is overwhelmed, unwieldy and tangled in red tape. Health Minister Deb Matthews agrees there are problems, but says it will take time to turn the system around. The province's $3-billion-a-year network of government-licenced, publicly-supported nursing homes is meant to provide highquality care to Ontario's most fragile and medically-needy residents. Situation Critical -- a Metroland Special Report -- shows a system in paralysis, with only one nursing-home bed in 100 available across Ontario, and with an average wait as high as 200 days in some areas. A $1.1-billion government program, created three years ago to make home support more widely and easily available, was supposed to ease the problem. Instead, wait lists have expanded, leaving more seniors in need of long-term care at home, and thousands more taking up hospital beds with nowhere to go. From 2007 to 2009, the average wait time for a nursing-home bed in Ontario more than doubled, from 49 to 109 days. The provincewide tally of people waiting is now more than 25,000 and rising, doubled SCOT GARDNER / METROLAND WEST MEDIA GROUP OUTSIDE HELP: Bureaucracy is such an obstruction that consultants to industry and the U.S. military are being retained to help streamline the process of moving people into Ontario nursing homes. and more are planned, the ministry says. In such placements, the elderly are "building their strength up, they're getting healthier, and are actually, many of them, going home, those who would have otherwise thought they were going into long-term care," Matthews said. The Metroland investigation also found bureaucracy is such an obstacle that consultants to industry and the U.S. military are being retained to help improve the process of moving people into nursing homes. Some efficiency methods being tried in Ontario are adapted from the assembly lines of the Toyota car company. One study counted 160 distinct steps, including access to nine separate databases, just to move a senior from hospital into a long-term care bed. Done by Orillia consultant Jeff Doleweerd from observations at Quinte Health Care's Trenton Memorial, that 2008 study -- sponsored by the Toronto-based Change Foundation -- identified wasteful steps that occur in hospital before patients leave for a nursing home. Efficiency consultant Ron Bercaw has adapted a Toyota assembly line technique to help streamline the process of getting Ontario's elderly out of hospitals and into nursing-home beds. Bercaw first adapted the "Lean" technique to save a failing auto-parts plant he managed in Ohio, and then taught it to 30 Ontario hospitals and CCACs in the last twoand-a-half years. See Nursing page 15 What long-term care residents pay Long-term care residents make co-payments that can be adjusted based on need Standard accommodation: $53.07 a day, $1,614.21 a month Semiprivate: $61.07 a day, $1,857.55 a month Private: $71.07 a day, $2,161.71 a month Short-stay program: $34.53 a day, $1,050.29 a month from 12,000 in 2005. The supply of new beds is static, with annual growth of less than one per cent. Only 900 more beds are expected to be available in nursing homes over the next 24 months. The average wait for a long-term care bed in the Mississauga Halton LHIN is 114 days. Only 29.3 per cent get their first choice of home. For hard-to-place seniors with a need for a higher level of care, waits can be two or more times the average. In rural areas and northern Ontario, families may be separated by hundreds of kilometres, if there are beds at all. On average, less than 40 per cent of applicants get their first-choice home. Matthews, the health minister, says she is aware "we do have work to do in the access to long-term care homes." "We know that people are waiting a long time to get into a long-term care home. But, we also know that with the right investments, we can actually keep people at home longer." Matthews says the ultimate solution is to rely more on care at home, and to make more use of shorter-term "restorative" beds. By February, Ontario had 813 of the interim beds Matthews referred to, in nursing homes, hospitals or hospital-managed sites,