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Sign Petition to Help Seniors
Posted on Mon, January 16, 2012 at 8:34 pm
Lately, I have read too many news stories about hospitals trying to force seniors out the door using a threatening letter accompanied by a huge bill. Can you imagine the senior`s feeling of despair and panic? I fully understand that hospitals are acute care facilities and not long-term care facilities, but they simply cannot use scare tactics when the real problem is that seniors are victims of a system that does not have enough long-term care beds and funding for other appropriate levels of care.
Provincial government must open their eyes to the domino effect of long-term care shortages:
- seniors await nursing home placement in hospital, which is a costly alternative and one that ties up beds for those who do need acute urgent care
- seniors wait for a long-term care bed in their own home. In order for a senior to be elibigle for a nursing home bed, they must must require 24 hours, 7 day a week care and usually assistance with Activites of Daily Living. In the meantime, a senior is at home, likely depending on family members to provide care, or paying for home care because most governments do not fund 24/7 home care. Or, the senior and their family are struggling to get by until a bed becomes available.
- a senior may be in a retirement home and a condition has worsened or suddenly changed. While the retirement home is a care setting that does provide medical care, most retirement homes will charge additional fees as the amount of care required increases. Depending on the health change, this can be an increase of several hundred dollars a month. For a senior on a fixed income, this may be an impossibility.
On a personal note, my grandmother passed away in a retirement home while waiting for a nursing home bed. While she did have advanced Alzheimers, I know that she would have received a more appropriate level of care in a nursing home.
Increasing the number of long-term care beds is not the only solution. Increased funding for home care is a more cost-effective alternative, and one that is preferred by seniors because they want to age in place.
Please join me in helping the Dimitras family call on the government to increase funding for seniors (recall from an earlier blog that 92 year old Dimitra Daskalos was threatened with a $19,000 hospital bill in an effort to get her out the door). Below is a link to the Ontario Petition form. Please gather as many original signatures in ink as possible and mail the petitions by February 14, 2012 to
Peter Tabuns, MPP
923 Danforth Avenue
Toronto, ON
M4J 1L8
To download a copy of the petition please visit them on their Facebook page at Fair Care Canada.
I sincerely thank you for taking the time to help our seniors.
Christine
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