The acceptance rate for new home-care clients has dropped to just 55 per cent during COVID-19.
Home-care leaders and advocates say staffing pressures and wait lists in their sector are even worse, with one leader pointing to data showing the acceptance rate for new home-care clients has dropped to just 55 per cent during the pandemic.
This drastic drop in nurses has left many people in the province waiting for home-care supports. Between 900,000 and a million people receive home care in Ontario, including about 750,000 in the publicly funded system.VanderBent says that’s plummeted to about 55 per cent provincewide. In its news release, the province said the funding “will benefit the nearly 700,000 families who rely on home care annually, preventing unnecessary hospital and long-term care admissions and shortening hospital stays.”
As in hospitals, the biggest problem facing home and community care is a lack of front-line nurses, personal support workers and therapists. According to the OCSA, the sector has a staff vacancy rate of 17 per cent — more than double the previous year’s rate of 6.8 per cent. “Everybody is scrambling for the same staff resources,” Carter says, noting that the competition for health-care workers is leading to harms across the system.
A nurse needs to know how to use a special kind of ventilator to help Alexa breathe, put a suctioning tube down her throat, push food through her GI tube, administer her many medications and resuscitate her when she suddenly stops breathing.Payette-Kyryluk says many of the nurses now assigned to their home — a mix from publicly funded and private services — are not always equipped to care for Alexa on their own.
Right now, about 15,000 people in Ontario are waiting for home-care supports, Martineau says, noting that “wait times can vary from service to service or patient to patient.” The subsequent staffing challenges hamper the flow of patients in and out of hospitals, further disrupting the system, and deeply affect individuals and their families, he says.
But Payette-Kyryluk says it’s increasingly hard to fit in those moments, because she so often has to take the place of a nurse to do Alexa’s medical care.