WHRA opening 65 new temporary transitional care beds

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This article was published 07/09/2017 (2963 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba government is spending $9 million on privately-run transitional care beds it says are a necessary stopgap measure during its two-year plan to overhaul health-care delivery in Winnipeg.

Starting in October, patients who no longer require hospital care but are not quite ready to move to a long-term care facility or return to their own home, can be shifted to one of 65 private beds at a retirement residence in the city’s Kildonan area.

The facility’s Toronto-based owner, All Seniors Care, won the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority’s bid to provide the transitional service until Sept. 30, 2019. Twenty-eight beds at Victoria General Hospital will also serve as transitional care beds during this time period.

By fall 2019, the WRHA expects Victoria, Seven Oaks General Hospital and Concordia Hospital will have fully transitioned to their new community hospital roles and be prepared to reabsorb the patients in the public system.

“We’re going to have a better system, a less disruptive system when the community hospitals are fully converted in two years,” Manitoba Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen told reporters during Thursday’s announcement at the River Ridge II retirement residence.

“We knew that there would be a time frame in between getting the community hospitals to the point where they needed to be with transitional care.”

Goertzen spoke glowingly of the retirement community, which is brightly lit, with open spaces, balconies and even its own small cinema. But that did little to appease NDP health critic Matt Wiebe or the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union.

Wiebe called it “another temporary fix.”

“The facility announced today won’t be effective if patients have nowhere to go or don’t have the supports they need,” he said in a statement. “The Pallister government slashed home care supports, like the Hospital Home Team, and cancelled hundreds of PCH beds across the province.”

The WRHA is expecting to announce next week the private company it’s partnering with to launch enhanced home care services, a program first mentioned in April, just weeks after it shuttered the Hospital Home Team without warning.

Thursday’s transitional care bed announcement is just “a step towards privatization,” said MGEU president Michelle Gawronsky. “It’s the erosion of the foundation of our beloved home care program.”

Gawronsky wants to see the government spend $9 million on the public home care system.

“If you inject that money right now into our public home care system, that would open up vast amounts of positions where your transition teams would build immediately,” she said.

MGEU came armed with survey results it offers as evidence Manitobans want to keep the service public. Probe Research polled 1,000 adults in early June about the service.

It noted the WRHA was creating a specialized home care team to help seniors live at home while waiting for a bed in a personal care home and then asked whether that service should be delivered by a private, for-profit home care company or by the current not-for-profit home care service.

More than 70 per cent said not-for-profit, while 18 per cent said for-profit, and nine per cent weren’t sure.

But Gina Trinidad, the WRHA’s chief health operations officer, said the interim plan is necessary in order to quickly facilitate the changes that are beginning in earnest this fall.

“We needed to ensure we had 65 spaces… to kick-start our changes this fall,” she said.

River Ridge II was deemed ideal because it still has plenty of space, having only been operational for a year. While WRHA administrators will be on site, All Seniors Care will provide all the staff.

jane.gerster@freepress.mb.ca