Home Care Ontario Launches New Campaign to 'Bring Health Care Out of the Hallway and into the Home'
End Hallway Health Care highlights home care as the solution to hallway health care in Ontario
TORONTO, Feb. 14, 2019 /CNW/ - Home Care Ontario, the voice of home care in OntarioTM, launched a new campaign today to draw attention to home care as the solution to ending hallway health care in Ontario. The End Hallway Health Care campaign calls for putting home care at the centre of the health care system to take the pressure off our overcrowded hospitals while providing more patients and their families with the professional care they need in their own home.
"Hallway health care is a nightmare that more and more Ontario families are having to live through," said Sue VanderBent, CEO, Home Care Ontario. "The good news is that we have a government committed to ending the crisis and we believe more home care is a key part of the solution. People want and need more home care and it is time we embrace professional home care services to get people out of the hallway and back into their homes."
Hospital overcrowding has become the new normal in Ontario. Fifteen percent of Ontario hospital beds are now occupied by patients who no longer require a hospital stay but simply have nowhere else to go for their care. That is an average of 3,000 people, every day, in hospital beds across the province because they cannot get the professional home care services that would allow them to recover in the comfort of their own home. Delivering more care at home would help end hallway health care by helping people stay out of the ED, get home sooner and give people more control over their care.
As part of End Hallway Health Care, Home Care Ontario has proposed a series of immediate and long-term recommendations to make professional home care services more available, including:
- Helping more people stay out of hospitals and get back home swiftly by increasing home care funding by 1 per cent;
- Getting more professional caregivers into the home by addressing the Personal Support Worker shortage; and,
- Empowering patients, reducing red tape to embrace technology, and building stronger connections between hospitals and home care.
Home Care Ontario is inviting Ontarians to visit endhallwayhealthcare.ca to learn more about our recommendations and lend their voice to the call for more home care to end hallway health care. The campaign, which builds Home Care Ontario's 2019 pre-budget submission Delivering More Care at Home, also includes:
- A new Facebook Page Facebook.com/homecareontario;
- An upcoming thought leadership paper This Care Can Be Given at Home; and,
- Online ads about the importance of home care.
"The status quo is simply no longer an option," concluded VanderBent. "Ontarians want a new approach that puts home care at the centre of a long-term solution. By making the right investments in home care today, we can build a system that helps end hallway health care, frees up resources for new ways of supporting patients at home, and delivers real results for patients and their families."
About Home Care Ontario:
Home Care Ontario, the voice of home care in OntarioTM, is a member-based organization with a mandate to promote growth and development of the home care sector through advocacy, knowledge transfer, and member service. Home Care Ontario members include those engaged in and/or supportive of home-based health care. In Ontario, service provider organizations are responsible for providing nursing care, home support services, personal care, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, social work, dietetics, speech language therapy and medical equipment and supplies in the home to individuals of all ages. An estimated 58 million hours of publicly and privately purchased home care service is provided annually across the province.
SOURCE Ontario Home Care Association
Yara Salama, 647-388-9272
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