Doctors warning of 'negligent' in-home palliative care in rural Ontario invited to meet with province
CBC
Two palliative care doctors who've spoken out about problems with nursing care for in-home patients in the Grey-Bruce region say they've been invited to a meeting to talk about possible solutions.
“To me it’s encouraging that someone actually heard us," Dr. Susan Batten told CBC News. "Whether that will facilitate effective change has yet to be determined.”
Last week Batten and Dr. Alex Hodgson, another doctor in the area who specializes in end-of-life care, both spoke to CBC News about what they say is sub-standard care by the Victorian Order of Nurses (VON).
VON is under contract by Ontario Health @Home to provide in-home nursing. The doctors said VON nurses consistently fall short of a basic standard of care while Care Partners, which has a similar contract in the region, regularly meets the standard.
They shared concerns that the complex palliative patients they were visiting in the community, who had been assigned a VON nurse, were being put at risk.
"I ask for Ontario Home @ Health to suspend VON nursing from caring for complex palliative patients in the community until concerns around poor nursing skills and lack of in-home charting are addressed," Dr. Batten wrote to the province telling them she would stop seeing those patients at the end of Febuary, if a solution wasn't reached.
"I can no longer place my patients or myself at risk of such negligence," she wrote.
Batten said since CBC News published the story on Feb. 3, a doctor who works with Ontario Health @Home reached out to set up a meeting. Batten said Hodgson received a similar call.
CBC News has reached out to Ontario Health @Home but did not receive a response.
Batten said she has been raising the issue for years, and is only willing to meet if it has the potential to lead to improvements in care. She also wants someone in the meeting who works as a care co-ordinator in frontline nursing care.
"We were very clear that we were not interested in sitting in a meeting that would make us feel that we were heard but with no effective change after that," said Batten.
"We really wanted an agenda that looked at change, whether through assessments of the contracts, the type of care that’s provided and the way that the system is organized that allowed for this failure of care."
Batten said her issue isn't with VON nurses, many of whom she described as dedicated professionals. However she said for years there have been problems with oversight and training and how the nurses' time is managed which has affected patient care.
CBC News reached out to Ontario's health ministry and to VON for comment but did not receive a reply.
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