Controversial law designed to free up hospital beds to be tested in Ontario court
Controversial law designed to free up hospital beds to be tested in Ontario court
A new charter challenge set to get underway on Monday will test the constitutionality of a controversial Ontario law that allows hospitals to place discharged patients into long-term care homes not of their choosing or face a $400-per-day charge if they refuse.
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The law allows hospital placement coordinators to choose a nursing home for a patient who has been deemed by a doctor as requiring an "alternate level of care," or ALC, without consent. They can also share the patient's health information to such homes without consent. Patients can also be sent to nursing homes up to 70 kilometres from their preferred spot in southern Ontario and up to 150 kilometres away in northern Ontario. The law sparked outrage among seniors.
So seniors go to the hospital with a chronic health issue and get institutionalized instead?
Seniors who can’t independently care for themselves and who don’t actually need acute care anymore.
And aren’t they getting institutionalized either way? They can’t live independently anymore, so do they live in the hospital forever?
It doesn’t feel nice but I don’t think it’s fair to live in the hospital when there are homes designed for the specific care levels instead. I think the LTC system needs reform, but this feels lesser of two evils.
You can no longer care for yourself.
Do you agree that because you can no longer care for yourself that it is okay for you to be shipped off to wherever the Government chooses and strip your of your rights?
It's complicated.
Not medically able to care for yourself is not the same as not mentally competent to make decisions.
The government is saying find a place or we'll find I've for you, their not saying you can't choose or taking away any rights. They're just saying you can't live in the hospital and occupy hospital rooms which are in shortage right now.
Do you agree that because you can no longer care for yourself that it is okay for you to be shipped off to wherever the Government chooses and strip your of your rights?
I did address that though. This isn't stripping and removing rights.
If they can find accommodation then they can use it, but if they can't then they simply don't get to live in the hospital indefinitely.
Are they designed for that specific care level though? Or are they designed to squeeze as much money out of the system while providing the lowest level of care possible?
My wife's grandmother is in LTC and her family visits every day, and they constantly have to raise issues to the home, and to their credit they have been improving based on that. Not everyone has an advocate like that, so I'm not going to say the LTC system is great, it needs work and oversight, and I really would like to see where the money goes because the staff are exhausted.
But yes, they are designed for that. wife's grandma has issues which have evolved from needing occasional nurse check-ins to make sure she had her meds to needing help getting up and using the washroom, needing to be rotated in bed, pretty much full time care. The home shes in suggested it was time to move her up a floor with the next level of care because the staff on her current floor weren't equipped for it. It's much better there now where the system is set up for her needs.
I know that's just an example of one in a home that it took a couple years to get her into.