- 注册
- 2002-10-07
- 消息
- 402,187
- 荣誉分数
- 76
- 声望点数
- 0
The Progressive Conservatives would attack backlogs in Ontario’s health system by trying to build 15,000 new nursing-home spaces in five years, leader Doug Ford said Friday, three times as many as the Liberals say they can open.
It wouldn’t be enough even if he could do it. None of the parties has a plan to do enough about a major problem that’s bearing down on us fast.
Frail patients who don’t quite need as much care as a hospital gives but have nowhere else they can safely go are a major problem in Ontario. They and people waiting at home make up waiting lists for nursing homes that totalled 32,000 people as of the middle of last year. In hospitals, “alternative-level-of-care” patients keep people with bigger needs from getting moved into proper rooms, which ripples out to longer emergency-room waits and even overstretched ambulance services.
Both the Liberals and Tories say they want to get 30,000 new beds opened in 10 years; the New Democrats want to add 40,000.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, left, with NDP Leader Andrea Horwath in February.
In the first five years, the Liberals say they can get 5,000 of those beds going (and in fact allocated all of them to projects around Ontario earlier this week), while both opposition parties say they’d get 15,000 beds open in the same time.
“The first thing we’re going to do is listen to health-care professionals, including the nurses and doctors who are on the front lines,” Ford said at an appearance in Sarnia. “We’re then going to cut wait times by opening up new long-term care beds across the province. This will ensure that people who need care can always get the best possible care, while taking the strain off our hospitals for everybody else.”
Tory Leader Doug Ford promised to open 30,000 new long-term care beds over a decade if he’s elected premier. Ford made the promise in Sarnia Friday morning while talking about hospital wait lists. (Paul Morden, Postmedia
This is the last and most ambitious of Ford’s Five Priorities, the highlight reel of promises that’s serving the Tories in place of a costed-out platform. It’s also the only one preserved from the People’s Guarantee, the platform assembled under former leader Patrick Brown.
Opening 15,000 beds on the way to 30,000 or 40,000 would be a big deal. Ontario has about 77,500 nursing-home beds now, so the parties all want to increase the supply by about half in 10 years. According to the latest provincial budget, one long-term-care bed costs about $54,000 a year in nursing, personal care and other expenses, so these are not cheap promises. We’re talking $1.6 billion to $2.1 billion a year in extra operating costs — and that’s without thinking about adding staff to provide better care.
The need is vast.
Take some big nursing homes in Ottawa. According to a monthly report from March, the city-owned Carleton Lodge, where an average of three beds become available each month, had a waiting list of 562 names. Villa Marconi had 195 people waiting and two beds available each month. The non-veterans’ wing at the Perley and Rideau had 831 people waiting for four vacancies a month.
Carleton Lodge
For the New Democrats, the Liberals and the Brown Tories, adding long-term-care beds is (or was) part of a large package of health promises, which all include increasing hospital funding and home care to varying degrees, with price tags in the billions over several years.
For the Ford Tories, the beds are the plan. They described it in three sentences, the first of which seems to have gone through a blender:
“A Doug Ford Ontario PC government will cut hospital wait times by ending hallway medicine to free up beds,” they said in a news release. “He will do this by building 15,000 long-term care beds within five years and 30,000 beds over 10 years. More long-term care beds located across the province will ease the burden on hospitals, allow doctors and nurses to work to their fullest abilities, and improve healthcare for Ontario families and patients when they need it most.”
Getting new nursing-home beds open is not as simple as putting up money, said Candace Chartier, head of the Ontario Long Term Care Association, which represents nursing-home operators (including for-profit, non-profit, and publicly owned homes). The association estimates that if no beds were built, aging baby boomers would extend the 32,000-name waiting list to 84,000 within 10 years.
Candace Chartier, CEO of the Ontario Long Term Care Association, in 2014.
“Any investment into long-term care beds and the sector is very good news,” Chartier emphasized, at both the beginning and the end of an interview after Ford’s announcement. But there’s building new nursing homes, there’s allocating money every year to pay for the care they give, and there’s renovating and rebuilding older homes to suit modern needs. Each is its own problem.
The operating licences on thousands of beds Ontario already has will run out between now and 2025, and how we’ll keep those in service is already a big question.
“We have a lot of homes that are 30 to 40 years of age. They’re nearing the end of their functional life. They’re starting to fail in different areas. If we don’t get more beds redeveloped and shovels in the ground, we have to somehow address that these homes need added capital,” Chartier said.
They have four-person wards where it’s noisy at night and infections can spread; they have designs that make it hard for people to get around on their own; they weren’t built for people who are in decent physical shape but have Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia.
“You cannot rebuild — it would be very difficult to rebuild 15,000 beds by 2025,” Chartier said, let alone do that and add 15,000 new ones. All the parties have to think through their plans. “They have to know that it’s not just a matter of announcing beds. It’s a matter of understanding the complexity to make it happen.”
The government’s supplied operators with funding to plan renovations but inflation’s whittled it away. Government standards are also suited to larger homes with economies of scale but that’s not great for small communities, Chartier said.
The scale of what we’re facing is immense and none of the parties has a plan big enough to get ahead of it. Ford’s promise of 15,000 new long-term care beds is a start but it will be hard to pull off and won’t end hallway health care even if he manages it.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
It wouldn’t be enough even if he could do it. None of the parties has a plan to do enough about a major problem that’s bearing down on us fast.
Frail patients who don’t quite need as much care as a hospital gives but have nowhere else they can safely go are a major problem in Ontario. They and people waiting at home make up waiting lists for nursing homes that totalled 32,000 people as of the middle of last year. In hospitals, “alternative-level-of-care” patients keep people with bigger needs from getting moved into proper rooms, which ripples out to longer emergency-room waits and even overstretched ambulance services.
Both the Liberals and Tories say they want to get 30,000 new beds opened in 10 years; the New Democrats want to add 40,000.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, left, with NDP Leader Andrea Horwath in February.
In the first five years, the Liberals say they can get 5,000 of those beds going (and in fact allocated all of them to projects around Ontario earlier this week), while both opposition parties say they’d get 15,000 beds open in the same time.
“The first thing we’re going to do is listen to health-care professionals, including the nurses and doctors who are on the front lines,” Ford said at an appearance in Sarnia. “We’re then going to cut wait times by opening up new long-term care beds across the province. This will ensure that people who need care can always get the best possible care, while taking the strain off our hospitals for everybody else.”
Tory Leader Doug Ford promised to open 30,000 new long-term care beds over a decade if he’s elected premier. Ford made the promise in Sarnia Friday morning while talking about hospital wait lists. (Paul Morden, Postmedia
This is the last and most ambitious of Ford’s Five Priorities, the highlight reel of promises that’s serving the Tories in place of a costed-out platform. It’s also the only one preserved from the People’s Guarantee, the platform assembled under former leader Patrick Brown.
Opening 15,000 beds on the way to 30,000 or 40,000 would be a big deal. Ontario has about 77,500 nursing-home beds now, so the parties all want to increase the supply by about half in 10 years. According to the latest provincial budget, one long-term-care bed costs about $54,000 a year in nursing, personal care and other expenses, so these are not cheap promises. We’re talking $1.6 billion to $2.1 billion a year in extra operating costs — and that’s without thinking about adding staff to provide better care.
The need is vast.
Take some big nursing homes in Ottawa. According to a monthly report from March, the city-owned Carleton Lodge, where an average of three beds become available each month, had a waiting list of 562 names. Villa Marconi had 195 people waiting and two beds available each month. The non-veterans’ wing at the Perley and Rideau had 831 people waiting for four vacancies a month.
Carleton Lodge
For the New Democrats, the Liberals and the Brown Tories, adding long-term-care beds is (or was) part of a large package of health promises, which all include increasing hospital funding and home care to varying degrees, with price tags in the billions over several years.
For the Ford Tories, the beds are the plan. They described it in three sentences, the first of which seems to have gone through a blender:
“A Doug Ford Ontario PC government will cut hospital wait times by ending hallway medicine to free up beds,” they said in a news release. “He will do this by building 15,000 long-term care beds within five years and 30,000 beds over 10 years. More long-term care beds located across the province will ease the burden on hospitals, allow doctors and nurses to work to their fullest abilities, and improve healthcare for Ontario families and patients when they need it most.”
Getting new nursing-home beds open is not as simple as putting up money, said Candace Chartier, head of the Ontario Long Term Care Association, which represents nursing-home operators (including for-profit, non-profit, and publicly owned homes). The association estimates that if no beds were built, aging baby boomers would extend the 32,000-name waiting list to 84,000 within 10 years.
Candace Chartier, CEO of the Ontario Long Term Care Association, in 2014.
“Any investment into long-term care beds and the sector is very good news,” Chartier emphasized, at both the beginning and the end of an interview after Ford’s announcement. But there’s building new nursing homes, there’s allocating money every year to pay for the care they give, and there’s renovating and rebuilding older homes to suit modern needs. Each is its own problem.
The operating licences on thousands of beds Ontario already has will run out between now and 2025, and how we’ll keep those in service is already a big question.
“We have a lot of homes that are 30 to 40 years of age. They’re nearing the end of their functional life. They’re starting to fail in different areas. If we don’t get more beds redeveloped and shovels in the ground, we have to somehow address that these homes need added capital,” Chartier said.
They have four-person wards where it’s noisy at night and infections can spread; they have designs that make it hard for people to get around on their own; they weren’t built for people who are in decent physical shape but have Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia.
“You cannot rebuild — it would be very difficult to rebuild 15,000 beds by 2025,” Chartier said, let alone do that and add 15,000 new ones. All the parties have to think through their plans. “They have to know that it’s not just a matter of announcing beds. It’s a matter of understanding the complexity to make it happen.”
The government’s supplied operators with funding to plan renovations but inflation’s whittled it away. Government standards are also suited to larger homes with economies of scale but that’s not great for small communities, Chartier said.
The scale of what we’re facing is immense and none of the parties has a plan big enough to get ahead of it. Ford’s promise of 15,000 new long-term care beds is a start but it will be hard to pull off and won’t end hallway health care even if he manages it.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
