A $156-million provincial investment could give more seniors access to physiotherapy, which could also lessen the demand for long-term care beds.
The province announced Thursday that more than 200,000 additional seniors and patients will have access to physiotherapy, exercise and fall prevention classes. The expanded services, expected to be rolled out in August, will also include more one-one-one physiotherapy, group exercise and fall prevention classes available in long-term homes.
The government expects to offer in-home physiotherapy to 60,000 more seniors and expand clinic-based physiotherapy across the province for 90,000 more seniors.
Physiotherapy will also be included in family health-care settings, like family health teams, nurse practitioner-led clinics and community health centres.
Meaghan Sharp, vice-president of complex care and physical rehabilitation services at St. Joseph’s Care Group, welcomes the news.
Although she doesn’t know all the details just yet, Sharp said the announcement shows how important it is to provide exercise to seniors.
“We’re all aging so we need to start promoting active aging,” she said. “We’re not saying that everyone is going to end up in long-term care. People sometimes have to go to long-term care and that’s great we have that service but wouldn’t it be wonderful if we saw a decrease in the need for long-term care beds because people were living actively at home.”
St. Joseph’s Care Group offers many rehabilitation programs in the community that helps thousands of seniors.
Sharp said the government placed more emphasis on seniors because of the aging population. More people are living longer and improved access to physiotherapy allows seniors to stay independent longer while living at home.
Michelle Addison, a physiotherapist with St. Joseph’s, said having more services available will allow seniors to transition back into the community quicker.
She said both the stroke program and Parkinson’s program are full so having physiotherapy more readily available will help reduce wait times for seniors trying to join those programs.
Peter Jordan, a physiotherapist at the Lakehead University Sports Medicine Clinic, also welcomed the announcement as well but wasn’t sure how the province was planning to distribute the funding.
Jordan suspects the funding will allow publicly-funded clinics to reduce wait times and could possibly help bring in more business to privately owned physiotherapy centres.
“For some of these seniors who have a lot of mobility issues and that kind of thing, they’re often waiting a long period before they can get in,” Jordan said.
“It’s going to reduce some of the demand on the public clinics and lessen their wait times. If they’re going to release some of that funding that private clinics can bill the government for some of these services, it would really open it up for more clinics.”
He added that the details will still probably have to be worked out before the services are expanded in the summer.
MPP Bill Mauro (Lib. Thunder Bay – Atikokan) said it was a significant investment to provide more health care.
“It’s a good move and continues to exhibit the focus we have on health care as our number one priority,” Mauro said.
“I think it is incredibly important to keep the quality of life and mobility issues for seniors as advanced as we can. We all know that health care takes up almost 45 or 50 per cent of the total provincial spending. When we can keep people healthier longer and physiotherapy is a part of that I think that benefits us all.”
