Around 35 per cent of Horizon Health hospital beds continue to be occupied by alternate level of care (ALC) patients, according to its president and CEO.
Margaret Melanson said the regional health authority continues to take steps to reduce the significant strain on inpatient capacity at its hospitals.
Speaking at Thursday’s quarterly board meeting, Melanson highlighted a pilot project underway at Fredericton’s Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital.
Horizon staff, social workers and discharge planners are now undertaking long-term care assessments for patients rather than the Department of Social Development.
“This has proven to reduce very much the length of time patients are waiting for this type of long-term care assessment, allowing them to have expedited access to a long-term care bed if it was available,” said Melanson.
Initial results from the pilot show a decrease in waitlist times for long-term care from 53 to 24 days, according to the health authority’s quarterly report.
Melanson told board members that because of the project, there are currently no patients waiting for long-term care assessments at the Chalmers Hospital.
“We’ve also heard anecdotally that the staff who know the patients the best, who have interacted with the patients during their stay in hospital, are really best suited to undertake those long-term care assessments,” she added.
“We recognize that having that long-term care assessment and the determination of the level of long-term care required by a patient is the first step for them to then go toward selection of the home of choice and the entire process around a discharge to a long term care facility.”
The health authority has requested about $1 million from the provincial government to expand this pilot project to other regional centres in the coming months.
However, these assessments are only part of the puzzle as New Brunswick faces a shortage of long-term care beds and a growing number of people needing them.
Melanson said they continue to liaise with Social Development and the government to create initiatives to access additional long-term care capacity in the province.
“With the growing trend of alternate level of care patients, the aging of our population and the seniors requiring these care and services, I would say there would be multiple homes that would be required in as short a time frame as possible to be able to provide the quality of care that seniors really need and deserve,” she said.
The health authority president said they believe there is also a need for more enhanced services for seniors that would allow them to stay in their homes for longer periods of time.
That could include increased hours for home care availability and funding for renovations to accommodate mobility devices, she said.
Horizon is aiming to reduce the number of ALC patients occupying hospital beds to 20 per cent by 2026.
