Filling empty residential care beds with long-stay patients from acute care hospital wards was a key recommendation in the updated Action Plan the BC Care Providers Association submitted to the BC Health Minister last year. Since then, a growing number of care providers have been contacted by health authorities across the province to fill empty residential beds with seniors from acute care - particularly in the Interior and Fraser Health Authorities.
More recently, care providers on Vancouver Island joined a coalition of seniors organizations calling for empty residential care beds in the Campbell River to be filled with seniors waiting in acute care. It now appears the Vancouver Island Health Authority (VIHA) is responding.
According to a recent report in, Victoria's Times Colonist newspaper VIHA has sent a notice to their residential case managers making sure at least 75% of residential care beds were retained for seniors waiting in acute care beds. In an interview with the paper, VIHA's Executive Director of Continuing Health Services Marguerite Rowe said, "We don't like to see seniors having long-term stays in hospital and we like to move them into an appropriate setting if they can't go home."
VIHA's Director of Home and Community Care Lois Cosgrove said residential care beds will not be left empty. She told the Time Colonist's Cindy Harnett that daily monitoring is in place to ensure "beds are never vacant." BCCPA is monitoring the progress of this new policy in the weeks ahead.
Despite some success on filling empty beds, VIHA still has not followed the lead of other BC health authorities and released information about how they have - or plan to - reallocate the increases in client user fees announced by the provincial government in 2009. When the fees were introduced care providers and seniors were promised that all new funding would be returned to facilities to improve quality of care and increase staffing levels. Despite repeated requests by the BC Care Providers Association, VIHA still has not produced a clear plan of where these millions of dollars are being reallocated to improve quality of care.
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