The same headlines come up every year in the news: “The summer is going to be difficult in Quebec’s emergency rooms due to the shortage of personnel and the absence of adequate resources to support the discharge of recovered patients. »
There is, however, a solution to prevent our Quebec health care system from being too centered on the hospital. It’s home care. Unfortunately, this care is far from efficient in Quebec. But with the right technology, it could bring about a mini-revolution and boost network activities outside of hospitals.
Upon reading the conclusions of the second volume of the report of the Health and Welfare Commissioner published this week and dealing with the performance of home care in Quebec, it is clear that a specific plan is necessary to respond to the 20 562 people are currently waiting for their first home care service in the province. With the aging of the population, the demand for home care increases significantly each year and we must improve and optimize home care throughout the province, starting this year.
Reduce hospitalizations
First, everyone will agree, home care responds to a request from the majority of seniors who want to stay at home and is the future of health care, both here and elsewhere in the world. In all the countries where my company operates, the authorities are refocusing the organization of their health care to promote care and support directly in the patient’s home. This reduces the number of hospitalizations, avoids returns to the hospital, while increasing hospital capacity for cases that really require it.
Despite Quebec’s desire to follow this path and develop the home care offer, we see that the current organization is greatly lacking and is struggling to meet all needs.
The Health and Welfare Commissioner observes in particular that:
- “User intervention profiles vary greatly from one territory to another”.
- “The majority of interventions focus on a few people; thus, 10% of home care users receive 70% of interventions”.
- “The proportion of hours worked in direct contact with the user for professional services and that for nursing care are low, ie 25% and 32% respectively”.
We therefore conclude that the province does not have an equivalent offer from one region to another and is struggling to meet the needs of all patients. For what ? Because the systems in place, obsolete, require attendants and nurses to spend far too much time filling out administrative paperwork rather than providing care.
Change
Home care is ripe for the age of technology and smart data. Imagine a platform powered by artificial intelligence that allows you to optimize nurses’ schedules by maximizing their daily journey, to associate patient needs with the right attendants, to ensure all documentation of visits directly in this platform, but also to extract real-time data on the management of all home care visits throughout Quebec.
This technology exists and is used in other jurisdictions in Canada and elsewhere in the world, as well as by the majority of home care companies in the country. By extending it across the province, Quebec will be able to develop a reliable home care strategy that will create care capacity to immediately tackle the long waiting list, while supporting hospitals in their efforts to bring patients home, in a safe and supervised environment.
The other provinces in the country have long since made the shift to home care, what are we waiting for to launch our own national modernization process? What are we waiting for to automate the administrative and repetitive tasks of nurses and allow them to increase their home visits? Shouldn’t we put an end to their unnecessary travel by concentrating all their patient files in one place? These are simple solutions that ultimately allow each patient to stay at home as much as they wish.
In a context of labor shortage, where every resource is precious, let’s take care of our professionals and their working conditions by enhancing their role at home.
It is possible to humanize home care through technology and data. Why not enjoy it here too?