The opposition parties say it’s time for government to come clean on just how many people are waiting for a nursing home bed.
“I would implore the minister of health to find out what those numbers are within our provincial and public hospitals,” said Karla MacFarlane, the Progressive Conservative health critic.
The province has been providing an incomplete picture of the waiting-list issue, reporting on its website that between 1,000 and 1,250 people are waiting for long-term care beds. But that number only covers the people living in their own homes and ignores those in hospital waiting for a nursing home placement.
It has been estimated that about 20 per cent of the province’s 3,554 in-patient hospital beds are occupied by people waiting to get into a nursing home. Most of those patients aren’t even at the front of the long-term-care queue, according to the province’s priority lists that place several categories of people including adults living in a situation of significant risk of self-neglect or abuse by others ahead of hospital patients.
“The government should really be mindful of the situation of those people in those so-called alternate level of care beds, people who are living in the hospital while they are waiting to get a place in a nursing home,” said NDP Leader Gary Burrill.
Burrill said neither he nor anyone else should question the fine level of care hospital staff provide for patients waiting to get into a long-term care facility.
“But it doesn’t matter how fine the level of care is, there is a core difference between a hospital and a nursing home. In a nursing home, there are professional, recreational programming staff, a part of whose mission is to create a sense of community in that facility. It makes a great deal of difference to people’s general well-being, that programming and that sense of community. That’s what a hospital isn’t designed to provide and can’t possibly provide.”
Burrill said it’s also a drain on public resources.
“We know it costs four times as much every day to pay for a person to be in a hospital as it does to pay for them to be in a nursing home. We are paying exponentially to have people in the wrong place.”
Burrill lays the blame directly at the feet of the Liberal government.
“When the current government came to power in 2013, one of the things on their desk was a plan to continue the opening of nursing home beds that had gone on for the four years previous with 300 new places. They set that plan over to the side, never proceeded with it. That is a big part of the reason why today we are having the systemic problems in health care, particularly around overcrowding in facilities in the nursing homes. As a result of that decision taken six years ago, large parts of our hospitals are full of people who aren’t hospital patients and the whole operation of the health-care system has cascaded into crisis.”
Ready and waiting
Tracy Barron, a spokeswoman for the Health Department, told The Chronicle Herald in an email that the department website reports wait times for people who are ready for placement, medically stable and waiting at home.
“Our system is designed to track the total length of time an individual is waiting, which could include their time waiting in the community and/or hospital (combination of both). It is not designed to isolate the hospital portion,” she said.
“The wait times for placement from hospital into long-term care differs based on the circumstances and care needs of the individual and is based on our placement policy.”
MacFarlane said the health issues in Nova Scotia have been “brought to a whole new crisis level.”
“What’s more alarming is that the Liberal government is not listening to the front-line workers who have ideas, who have solutions, who know why the system is broken.”
The Pictou West MLA said it’s incumbent on Health Minister Randy Delorey to work with opposition members, paramedics, nurses, doctors and residents of Nova Scotia to repair the system.
“What is there to hide?” she said. “Just be transparent and collectively ask why we are in this situation, admit why we are in this situation and let’s work together to fix it. Nova Scotians deserve better.
“A couple of weeks ago, we had 15 ambulances lined up at the QEII (hospital) because they couldn’t get access. The people they were taking care of were waiting to get into emergency because there were people in emerg already waiting to get into a bed but they can’t get to a bed because there are no beds for those people who need long-term-care facility beds.”
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