Aching for long-term care

BY ANDY BLATCHFORD

andy.blatchford@transcontinental.ca



The proposal to move a public long-term care facility for seniors to the West Island would relieve pressure on the Lakeshore General Hospital’s emergency room, according to the local health network’s interim director general.

Discussions to transfer Montreal’s Grace Dart Extended Care facility and its services to the West Island are still in an embryonic stage, but any step towards solving the need is welcome, Suzanne Turmel said.

“For long-term care, we don’t have the necessary resources to be able to meet the demand of the population,� said Turmel, who took over the West Island Health and Social Services Centre (WIHSSC) director general position after Luc Lepage left last month. “These patients, instead of being admitted to a long-term care or (an intermediate-care) bed, they end up in the emergency, which clogs up the beds in acute care where they shouldn’t be in the first place.

“It’s a whole spiral that we can never get out of.�

The West Island could receive 250 long-term care and 100 intermediate-care beds (for people who require less than two-and-a-half hours of assistance a day), she said. A new building would be constructed locally to house the relocated institution, which primarily serves an anglophone clientele in the Mercier/Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough.

“The patients who are there right now would move with them, but we’ll have the beds on our territory,� Turmel said.

There are 577 public beds for long-term care in the West Island, but 620 more are needed locally, she said. For intermediate care, the region is 100 spots short.

WIHSSC board of directors chair Sheila Laursen described the possibility of adding beds to stem a “growing crisis� in the West Island as “very exciting.�

“It’s not something that we wouldn’t have been able to do easily, even in a longer-term picture,� she said of bolstering suitable and relevant resources for seniors’ care with Grace Dart’s beds. “We need it. We need all of it. We’re very under resourced when you look at the population base and our age profile.�

Laursen said there’s a two- to three-year wait for placement at Ile Bizard’s Denis-Benjamin Viger long-term care facility, while in other areas of Montreal, it’s two to three months.

The addition of intermediate-care beds would also fill an important gap between home services and long-term care, she said.

Grace Dart administrative assistant Sara Duchesne said the relocation project is in its early stages and no decisions have been made. “It’s a big project, a lot of implications, and a lot of things need to be ironed out,� she said. “Things are happening, but it’s too soon to talk about it.�

A project concerning Grace Dart was presented to the Agence de la santé et des services sociaux (ASSS) de Montreal — the group that oversees the island’s health networks — according to its spokesman Laureanne Collin. She said it’s too early to comment on a potential move to the West Island, but added the ASSS recognizes the need for English services in the western end of the island.

Collin said ASSS will ensure the needs of its clients in Mercier/Hochelaga-Maisonneuve will be met if Grace Dart is relocated.