Source: Kamloops Daily News
Kamloops - Interior Health could open up several beds in Royal Inland Hospital for acute-care patients if it paid for more seniors' beds in private facilities.
Ridgeview Manor and The Hamlets have more than two dozen empty private-pay beds the health authority could contract out, even on a temporary basis.
Hendrik Van Ryk of H and H Total Care Services said Friday 19 of the 28 private-pay beds his company has at The Hamlets in Westsyde are open. The facility has 84 more beds funded by the IHA.
Will McKay, managing partner with Ridgeview's parent company Baltic Properties, said the new Brocklehurst facility has 11 or 12 of its 23 private-pay beds available.
Ridgeview has 129 residential-care beds in total; with IHA already contracting 106 of them.
"They (the IHA beds) were full from the get-go," he said in a telephone interview from Vancouver.
Van Ryk said the situation is similar in other parts of B.C.; private beds are available that the government could contract for seniors who are currently in hospital beds waiting for publicly subsidized beds to open up.
He said in some cases, seniors were in private beds paid for by their children until they could get into subsidized beds. But the economy has affected many who were doing that.
Residential care beds can get expensive, but they are still far cheaper than having seniors waiting in hospital beds, he noted.
But with all of B.C.'s health authorities having to grapple with deficit budgets that must be balanced, contracting out more publicly-subsidized beds isn't likely to happen.
McKay said people in the IHA beds will pay $30 to $70 a day, depending on their income. The health authority pays the difference up to the amount of its contract with Ridgeview.
Private-pay residents are subject to whatever the market decides their spaces are worth. He said it can range around $150 a day or more.
The beds the seniors occupy in the hospital while they await publicly subsidized residential-care spaces cost at least five times that.
But the health authority would be out of pocket to fund not only the acute-care beds, but add to its residential-care spending -- and that's something that's not possible right now, said Thompson-Cariboo-Shuswap chief operating officer Andrew Neuner.
"We don't have the operating funds to buy more beds at seniors' facilities," he said.
"As much as that makes economic sense, it still increases the money we have to put in the system. And the money just doesn't exist."
McKay said he could see that point.
"I don't know if there's a solution. It's really a funding issue."
His company has had temporary, one-year or shorter contracts with IHA for beds in a facility in the Okanagan. That contract ended after another private facility opened up and the IHA paid for some of its beds instead.
Another option he has seen is that family members pay for a loved one to be in a private bed until he or she can get assessed and accepted into a publicly subsidized bed.
Van Ryk said Interior Health had taken some temporary beds at The Hamlets, but cancelled them last fall.
With private beds available to ease some of the hospital-bed pressures, he's surprised the government hasn't done something to deal with the situation.
"There are a lot of seniors who are at home and at risk," he said.
