Patients guaranteed beds in new hospital

Chronic care patients now at the Emo hospital will be guaranteed beds in the newly-renovated long-term care facility, the Community Care Access Centre said yesterday.
Dave Murray, regional CCAC executive director, said the decision was made to offer some peace of mine for families with relatives there right now.
“From our standpoint, the people who are in the beds will have the first opportunity at the long-term beds once their completed,” he noted.
While this decision appears to circumvent some of the policy put in place for placement co-ordination services, he noted there really aren’t any protocols to deal with a hospital shutting down and then re-opening again.
“These types of situations don’t happen frequently,” Murray said. “[But] whoever is in the facility will get back into the facility.”
The uncertainty of patient placements at the Emo hospital came up during a presentation by Wayne Woods, CEO Riverside Health Care Facilities Inc., at the Rainy River District Municipal Association’s annual meeting Saturday.
La Vallee Clerk Laurie Witherspoon, whose father and father-in-law both are patients at Emo hospital, pressed Woods for a guarantee that spots are being reserved in the renovated hospital.
“The families need some assurance [the patients] are going back to their homes,” she argued.
La Vallee Reeve Ken McKinnon also pressed Woods. “This doesn’t make sense that someone gets kicked out of their homes, through no fault of their own, and not get guarantees [to be let back in]?”
But Woods said the power to guarantee spots in any of the long-term care beds in the district was beyond the mandate of Riverside. At best, all it could do is influence the CCAC to let the same patients back into the renovated facility, which he promised to do to the best of his ability.
Woods noted this is one of the inherent problems in the health care system today–that there really isn’t much of a “system” to speak off.
“We are still operating in isolation,” he said, from placement co-ordination services to ambulance services.
“Right now, we’re all over the place and really don’t talk to each other because the incentives aren’t there to talk to each other,” he remarked. “A system brings it all together and makes it work.
“For us to get into a system, we have to start working closer together, get into a community,” Woods stressed. “And if the powers that be don’t direct it from above, maybe we’ll have to direct it from above.”