For Life & Families

"As MPP, what model of health care would you support to best serve the Province  which includes a large number of seniors in need of care as well as new families moving to the area looking for doctors in the community?"

The Family Coalition Party believes that seniors should be at home or with family, not in institutions.

Yet a recent report on the Local Health Integration Networks (LHIN’s) by Dr. David Walker says that the Ontario health system prefers to place seniors in nursing homes. He says the lack of rehabilitation and home care options for seniors leads to more frequent hospital admissions. When in hospital, the lack of rehabilitation means seniors stay longer, block hospital beds and surgeries for patients who need them, absorb huge medical resources inappropriately, and get sicker so that eventually they do need to be placed in nursing homes. He says seniors and families should have more care and rehabilitation options open to them reflecting the level of care they need; home should always be first choice; but other non-hospital options need to be opened up as well. He says primary care physicians (family doctors) should be more available to maintain seniors and their families at home, and forestall crises that lead to placement in facilities.

We agree with these solutions. But this is not a new problem, it has existed for decades. My question is, why have the LHIN’s, in their six years of existence, costing vast amounts of scarce budget ($300 million this year) not moved to solve this problem already? Instead they have closed hospitals and Emergency Departments, which may have contributed to the death of a 13 year old girl in Niagara Region recently. Hamilton now has only two ER’s, both in the East End of the City, leaving Flamborough and adjacent areas with long trips through downtown Hamilton.

FCP believes that the problem is that the health care system is stuck and cannot break out of old habits. The LHIN’s are part of this, and are immobilized by lack of ideas, certainly, but also by entrenched bureaucratic and deferential ways of operating.

St. Joe’s in Hamilton recently employed Toyota workflow experts to reorganize their ER, which at the time was working very ineffectively. Toyota did a great job, and now the work gets done efficiently and staff are enthusiastic and work as an effective team. The initiative was led by the CEO of St. Joe’s, Dr Kevin Smith, but the operational design and implementation was all Toyota.

FCP believes that the LHIN’s should be disbanded and replaced by new organizations with new ideas. They should be led by innovative health system experts, accountable to the community, but who are willing to expand “outside the box” to employ new ideas and organizational designs to save money and increase effectiveness, as was done at St Joe’s. The redesign there was on a smaller scale but used principles and methodologies developed in the private sector to address the very problems encountered in the complex health care sector.