THUNDER BAY – The CEO of the North West Local Health Integration Network acknowledged plenty of challenges still remain in delivering health-care services in Northwestern Ontario.
Laura Kokocinski on Friday said the region’s size and sparse population are just two reasons the local LHIN fared poorly, compared to other areas of the province, in the 10th annual Health Quality Ontario Measuring Up report.
The region was below average in a number of key categories, lagging behind other LHIN’s in access to primary care, follow-up visits for patients with mental illness or addiction, the number of low- to moderate-need patients entering long-term care, wait times for patients to enter long-term care facilities and the number of palliative care patients who die in hospital.
Kokocinski said while the numbers aren’t great, the region is definitely making improvements in several key areas.
Better access to primary care is just one, she said.
According to the report, just 23.8 per cent of patients in the North West LHIN catchment area were able to access their primary-care giver – or someone in the same office – on the same or next day, well below the 43.5 per cent Ontario average. After-hours and weekend access is also well behind the rest of the province.
“We still have work to do and certainly the providers would indicate that and the public are saying we need better access. And we’re continuing to put efforts into place to be able to address that,” Kokocinski said on Friday.
“Those are still important areas that we’re looking at. In small communities, that’s challenging. The small hospitals still become the point of access for primary care. We know that primary care is happening in the small hospitals as opposed to larger cities like Thunder Bay.”
Kokocinski said two primary-care steering committees have been established, one in the city and one in the region.
“We’re meeting with them to talk about strategies, about how we could be doing things differently, how we can ensure service to people is improved over time.”
Palliative care is another area that is troublesome and also leads to gridlock at hospitals, particularly in Thunder Bay. Across Ontario, 64.9 per cent of palliative-care patients die in hospital. In the North West LHIN, that number jumps to 78.9.
There are a number of reasons behind this, Kokocinski said, calling the solutions hugely critical for delivering services to the region.
People prefer to die at home in familiar surroundings, and she expects the number to drop – but only if services are tailored to meet the changing trend.
“We’re continuing to work on that. In the Northwest, because of our large geography and our distributed population, we’re actually looking at a distributed model for hospice and palliative care,” Kokocinski said.
“Not that there would be one physical building, where we would bring everybody from the region in to a certain location to die, we are really looking at how we keep services closer to home, so people can die with their families and services that are available to them.”
Other findings from the report show patients in long-term care facilities suffer more day-to-day and severe pain than elsewhere in Ontario – 12.4 per cent compared to 6.1 per cent – and long-term care patients are restrained on a daily basis at more than twice the provincial average, 13.3 per cent to six per cent.
