TORONTO, Sept. 23, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On Tuesday September 24 at 9:10 am, the Ontario Health Coalition will hold a media availability regarding the Charter Challenge to Bill 7 being heard in court. Bill 7, the More Beds, Better Care Act (2002), passed by the Ford government, gives new powers to hospitals and placement coordinators to override the right of elderly patients to informed consent in order to force them out of hospital into long-term care homes that they do not want to live in. The law, passed in the summer of 2022 and put into effect that autumn, enables hospitals and placement coordinators to share patient information with an array of long-term care corporations and others without their consent. It enables them to apply for placement without the patient’s consent and to admit them into a long-term care home without their consent. If the patient refuses to go, the hospital is required to charge them $400 a day as a means of coercion. The law is used to force patients into long-term care homes that they do not want to go to because they are substandard, cannot provide appropriate care, are unsafe and are far away from loved ones. Under this law, patients in Southern Ontario can be moved up to 70 km away and in the north up to 150 km away, or further if no beds are available. For most, this is the last move of their lives and they will pass away in that long-term care home that has been forced upon them.
What: The case is a Charter Challenge: a challenge under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Constitution. It is a challenge to Bill 7, euphemistically titled More Beds, Better Care Act (2022). The Act neither provides more beds nor better care. It is legislation to enable the coercion of elderly patients to force them into long-term care homes that they do not want to go to. It applies to patients who are designated by hospitals as Alternate Level of Care (ALC), virtually all of whom are elderly. The patient advocacy groups have brought this Charter Challenge as the law targets the elderly for this deprivation of rights that all other patients enjoy and thus is age discrimination. It is also a threat to the life, liberty and security of the person. These are rights that are enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Constitution.
Where & When: Media availability in front of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice Courthouse at 361 University Avenue at 9:10 am on Tuesday September 24.
The case will be argued in person in courtroom 4 – 10 starting at 10 a.m. on Monday September 23 and Tuesday September 24.
Who: The judge will be Justice Robert Centa. The Charter Challenge has been brought by the Ontario Health Coalition and the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly. The Ontario Health Coalition is raising money to pay for the challenge from individual donations from the public.
Facts & Myths:
Ontario has the fewest hospital beds per person of any province in Canada and is almost at the bottom of all OECD countries. Ontario’s public hospitals have undergone the most radical downsizing of any province and of virtually all our peer countries. The reason is that Ontario funds its hospitals at the lowest rate per person of all provinces. Every service that is cut from public hospitals is privatized.
Despite repeated promises, the Ford government has not delivered on the tens of thousands of long-term care beds that they have repeatedly announced. The government has preferred to give licenses to the for-profit chains and has repeatedly increased the funding for them. This process takes much longer than other options. For example, the Ford government did successfully build fast-track long-term care homes that are non-profits in partnership with public hospitals during the pandemic.
Most long-term care homes are full all the time and patients have to wait for a bed to become open. The data shows that the public prefer the non-profit and public long-term care homes but the government has preferred to give licenses to for-profit long-term care corporations, particularly those with the worst records of poor care. Often the homes that have space are the ones to which no one wants to go, either because they are too far away, or because they are substandard.
There are not 6,200 ALC patients who should be out of hospital and are “blocking beds” as is sometimes stated or implied by hospital executives or government officials. In fact, the majority of ALC patients are waiting for care in some destination that is not long-term care. Some patients are in a medical bed waiting for a rehab bed, for example, and there is a significant portion of ALC patients waiting for rehab in hospital. Others are waiting for renovations on their homes in order to be able to go home after a stroke, or for another form of community care. Some are waiting for mental health, palliative care, or other types of hospital care. Less than half are waiting for long-term care homes.
ALC is an administrative designation, not a diagnosis. It is arbitrary and the drive has been to identify patients as ALC earlier and earlier in their hospital stay. Recently, one hospital manager informed the executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition that they will not admit any patients into complex continuing care without considering them ALC to somewhere else, for example. This cannot be allowed to continue. Patients have the right to chronic care if they need it.
Ontario’s patients have never been given a choice about the extreme downsizing of our public hospitals and the failure to build long-term care, supportive housing, home care capacity.
Bill 7 has not solved the ALC “problem’. Since the ALC hospital patients are crisis admissions to long-term care, they become priorities for admission. Other people waiting in the community for long-term care have to wait longer as their health status deteriorates. As hospital is most often the only path to get into long-term care now, Bill 7 simply uses cruelty and coercion to move out one ALC patient who is replaced by another.
Hospitals are not only acute care facilities, as has recently become a regular claim of hospital and government officials. They provide complex continuing care (chronic care) beds, palliative care beds, inpatient rehabilitation beds and a range of other non-acute types of care, and they always have done so. It is right and appropriate that they provide non-acute care and it is not in the public interest to shrink hospitals to only provide acute care. The majority if not all of every category of service cut from public hospitals is privatized, subject to for-profit ownership, co-payments and user fees, and, often, quality issues.
Ontario can afford to improve health care funding. This province consistently ranks at or near the bottom of the country in health care funding per capita and is billions of dollars below the average of the rest of Canada.
For more information: Natalie Mehra, executive director, Ontario Health Coalition (416) 230-6402.
