Ontario Auditor report on home health care in Ontario
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Opposition parties at Queen’s Park say the only reason the Liberals made a beer announcement this morning was to distract the public from other news. Auditor General Bonnie Llysyk released a report on how home health care is delivered in Ontario, and it does not look good. As Lisa Hepfner reports, it could be the beginning of the end for community care access centres.
“They threw at it everything they had, sex and beer, moving caucus out of the building. If they could have had pyrotechnics i’m sure they’d have done that too.” NDP Health Critic France Gelinas says the government doesn’t want people to pay attention to the report she requested from the auditor general. The report is on community care access centres, or CCACs, which are regional hubs that organize the health care Ontarians receive at home. There are 14 of them in the province. Each CCAC hires for profit and not for profit companies to perform the health care.
“Every time you have a different layer of organizations, there is over head and profit” says Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk. “Those add to the cost of home care in Ontario.”
They all have differents standards, and pay their CEOs as they see fit. Hamilton-Niagara’s is second from the top of the CCAC pay list. The auditor general found that the CCACs spend little more than 60 per cent of their 2.4 billion dollar budget on face to face patient care. Most of the rest is administration.
“The structure has failed us” says France Gelinas. “It is costing us a pile of money and it is a disservice to people.”
Jeff Yurek is the PC Health Critic. “Home care is the cheapest method of care. 45 dollars a day compared to 10 times that in a hospital bed. The province should be treating this as a first resort, not its last.”
Neither will say it directly, but the Auditor General and the Health Minister are implying that it’s time to do away with CCACs altogether.
“I intend to follow through on her recommendation, which was to review the service delivery model…that includes all aspects of it” said Health Minister Eric Hoskins today.
The CCACs say they are still best positioned to deliver home health care, but agree they need to act more consistently.
