Median wait time for first home care visit 17 days

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This article was published 27/10/2023 (770 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

First-time home care clients are often waiting upwards of two weeks for their initial visit, if their case is not prioritized as clinically necessary. Wait times for home care in Manitoba typically range from a few days to a few weeks, recent data show.

New home care clients can be assigned a case co-ordinator right away, but it can take about 16 days for the case co-ordinator to do an assessment and schedule an initial visit with a health-care aide. That brings the median wait for the first home care visit to 17 days. (Median means half of clients are waiting longer and half are receiving quicker services.)

Those who need home care visits from a nurse instead of a health-care aide waited only a median time of two days between March and May, according to Shared Health data. Nurse visits have to be clinically ordered and are given priority in cases where, for example, the client has been newly diagnosed with diabetes and needs help injecting insulin.

Manitoba disability advocates filed freedom of information requests on a variety of provincial health wait times and provided the resulting data to the Free Press.

The three-month data snapshot was captured after a Winnipeg cancer patient waited more than two weeks for palliative home care services and died before receiving her first visit in February.

Compared to other provinces, Manitoba appears to be falling in line. The reported national average wait for home care services was three days in 2020-21, and Manitoba matched that three-day average based on partial provincial data provided to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

Luba Bereza, director of centralized home care and regional palliative care for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, said the 2023 median wait times appear to be accurate.

Getting home care involves a case co-ordinator doing an assessment, coming up with a care plan and submitting it to the scheduling department, which fills appointment slots, said Bereza during an interview Thursday.

In late June, a consultant’s review of palliative home care found 15 instances of communication breakdowns that led to a worker showing up for their first visit with 62-year-old Katherine Ellis after Ellis had already died.

The review made 21 recommendations, including relying more heavily on backup services and private agency staff to provide home care as a cheaper option.

The WRHA is finalizing a public tender process for a backup agency and will continue to use private agency staff as a backup plan, but privatizing the home care program isn’t on the table, Bereza said.

She said the home care program has a “robust” workforce of more than 1,600 and is not planning to increase its threshold for private agency staffing. The home care review raised questions about whether the current two per cent threshold for agency use is effectively serving patients.

The consultant’s recommendations are still under consideration, Bereza said, but the intention is to continue the practice as it has been for decades, “which is to use backup agencies only in situations where we can’t fill critical visits.”

Eligibility changes for home care services, including denying care to individuals who have relatives who could act as caregivers, are also not under consideration.

“There’s no intention of overhauling home care and making it private, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” Bereza said.

katie.may@winnipegfreepress.com