Look at any recent policy document from the Ontario Ministry of Longterm Care and you’ll find a common theme: the importance (especially in the context of an aging population) of community health services.
As the aging population of the province increases, Ontario's Community Care Access Centres (CCACs)--a government supported network that connects Ontarians with in-home and community-based health care--will play an increasingly vital role in delivering health care and helping Ontario seniors maintain their quality-of-life.
But how the CCACs--and indeed the entire Ontario healthcare system--will cope with significant demographic changes is still unclear.
A recently completed
4-paper series published by Ontario's 14 Community Care Access Centres (CCACs) looks to tackle some of this ambiguity by asking tough questions that, according to the final report, "need to be asked and discussed if Ontario is to serve the growing number of seniors and children with complex needs over the next two decades."
"We launched the paper series--Health Comes Home: A Conversation about the Future of Care--because we know that a lot of populations, including not only seniors but people requiring hospice palliative care, and children with complex needs, are going to need integrated at home-care in the coming decades," says Sharon Baker, chief operating officer with the Ontario Association of CCACs. "We need to know what kind of resources we'll need to provide the best kind of care and this might involve a real transformation of the health care system."
The four papers in the series outline the demographic and technological shifts that will affect health care delivery in the coming decades focusing specifically on the changes and opportunities faced by populations most often served by CACC services: seniors with complex health care needs, children with chronic condition and their caregivers, and patients requiring longterm palliative care.
In general, the papers were intended to address four interrelated questions:
What should we expect from our health system? How will we come together to meet the needs of patients? How will we pay for a transformed system? How will we value and care for our informal caregivers?
"The reports are not full of answers" says Baker. "They are really just a first step in sparking a conversation."
A conversation that, she hopes, will be continued on the Ontario Associations of CCAC's new interactive website:
http://moreandless.ca.
The website, which presents the information in the paper series in a simplified and user-friendly format, also invites visitors to provide their own feedback.
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Sharon Baker, Chief Operating Officer, Ontario Association of Community Care Access Centres