Doctors at Mount Sinai also make house calls in partnership with a community support agency that receives $480,000 in annual funding from the province. While the funding amounts to “a rounding error on everybody’s budget,” Dr. Sinha said, the government gets a big bang for its buck. Every patient who remains in the community instead of a long-term care home saves the system $50,000 a year.
“We just need to keep 10 patients out of a nursing home for one year, and the program pays for itself,” he said.
The program is also succeeding by having fewer patients admitted to hospital, where acute-care beds typically cost about $1,000 a day. Mount Sinai’s readmission rate has dropped to 9.7 per cent from 14.4 per cent in fiscal 2010.
Stacey Daub, chief executive officer of Toronto Central Community Care Access Centre, says a study done by U.S. health firm Kaiser Permanente shows that 1 per cent of the population account for 30 per cent of total health-care costs.
“It is the 1 per cent who we fail, both in terms of integration and transitions and client experience and outcomes,” Ms. Daub said.
Reader weighs in
From oldgal67 via globeandmail.com:
If communities (there must be some agency somewhere that could take this on) set up programs of volunteers who would undertake to do a neighbourhood watch on seniors in their midst, getting groceries, getting to medical appointments, hairdressers, etc., a lot of the elderly could either stay indoors more or be driven where they need to go. Family doctors could help in this by advising co-ordinators if one of their elderly patients needs help.
Clearing sidewalks should be a major priority for all towns and cities as not only the elderly but people with strollers or the wheelchair-bound need clear paths for getting around. In the old days (not that long ago) people used to be held responsible for the bit of sidewalk in front of their own property … what happened to that? It was a good idea, provided a bit of exercise for people and helped everyone get around more safely. We don’t seem to do “sensible” any more … we’ve replace it with “selfish” which, when it comes to the elderly, is 90 per cent of the problem. People don’t look after their own as they used to, preferring to offload responsibility for their very young and their very old onto social agencies and other people.
