Patients First Marathon
Change is necessary for sustained and progressive success but it is rarely simple or easy. Such is the case with Patients First, new legislation that the Ontario government’s Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC) first proposed on December 17, 2015 to improve the accessibility, integration and consistency of patient care across the province. This proposal has since progressed to Bill 41, the Patients First Act, which passed second reading on October 27, 2016. A key part of this legislation calls for integrating Ontario’s 14 Community Care Access Centres (CCACs) into their corresponding Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs).
Since its introduction, Patients First’s proposed design has and continues to evolve. The due diligence to advance this change is also shaping it by shining a light on high performing parts of the current system.
A noteworthy shift is the new context the MOHLTC placed around reintroduction of the legislation. Essentially, the narrative about CCACs has changed to be one about building on the strength of the current home and community care sector. Minister Eric Hoskins has said on numerous occasions: “This is not about fixing a broken system but leveraging the assets within the CCACs for the broader good.”
These assets include people, processes and technology. On the people side, initial integration talks cited the need to have CCAC care coordinators in hospitals and physicians’ offices as a key goal. Digging deeper, many learned that care coordinators have been working in hospitals and connected to physicians’ offices for years. In fact, this practice made it possible for care coordinators to help 210,000 Ontarians transition from hospital to home with a warm hand-off in 2015/16. We all know now this practice is working.
Instead, we need to focus on how to effectively optimize the relationships between care coordinators and so many parts of the system, such as primary care, acute care, working with home care providers, community resources and in patients’ homes. In my first post, Sam’s story demonstrates how our care coordinators use these relationships to help patients, even those with complex health and socioeconomic needs, to stay out of hospital.
The new system can also leverage process and technology assets. The MOHLTC is seeking a dashboard with readily accessible information to help it assess how the home and community care system is functioning, both pre and post-integration. There is now clear recognition that all CCACs use a dashboard, of various levels of sophistication, to provide oversight and inform decisions. Our care coordinators use Insights, an interactive dashboard, for multiple purposes, from planning patient visits to measuring their outcomes. The Ministry can adopt and adapt an existing CCAC dashboard.
This expanded understanding of the capacity to apply CCAC’s, as well as other’s assets, to the system’s greater transformation, opens opportunities for us to achieve several aspirational milestones or goals that put patients first. Here are three goals Patients First can realize, if health care leaders effectively leverage these assets:
Aspirational Milestones or Goals
1. More Engaged Primary Care Providers to Help Patients Achieve their Goals
A great benefit we can realize is having a system that makes it easier for primary care providers (including physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants) to interact with the broader community of support services that help patients achieve their goals. This includes creating stronger connections between primary care and community resources that address a patient’s socioeconomic or cultural needs, as well as publicly funded services.
Through our care coordinators’ experiences, we know how crucially important primary care involvement is to ensure our patients have the best outcomes but it’s not easy for these providers to interact with our current, intricate community care system with its multiple access points.
Patients First legislation contemplates better understanding, planning and support for primary care and a future with expanded roles to complement their practice. These roles will involve primary care providers more closely in the planning for home and community care at the regional, neighborhood and patient level. For example, this means that a family doctor will know that patients like Yasmin, a single, Urdu-speaking senior, who suffers from depression and diabetes, are connected with a local cultural or faith-based group, as well as home and community services.
2. Inserting the Voice of the Patient and Caregiver in Planning
The new Act sets a requirement for each LHIN to have a Patient and Family Advisory Committee to support community engagement. This offers the potential for LHINs to have and use a greater line of sight about what’s important to patients and families in their day-to-day planning.
All CCACs have experience with patient engagement strategies, and can bring that knowledge of how to involve patients and families into the LHIN’s planning work.
In 2014, we established Share Care Council – a highly structured and successful patient and caregiver advisory forum. It includes 15 patients, substitute decision-makers and family members, who volunteer their time to provide input into new programs and services. Share Care Council applies a carefully defined approach that authentically engages patients and caregivers to elicit their valuable input.
What’s eye opening is Share Care Council members’ responses to questions about how our programs can best meet their needs. We don’t hear “We need more personal support workers (PSWs) or more nursing care.” Instead, they tell us about their care experience, how it made them feel and how our system design can do better. It is less about the technical elements of care and more about the soft touches, social interaction and how these services are delivered that make the difference. For patients like Hilda, it’s having a PSW who knows how to braid her hair and set her up in the chair by the window when she leaves.
Through this requirement, the expanded LHINs can discover that when you carefully engage with patients and families on your journey of continuous quality improvement, their experience can drive development of meaningful programs and changes to care.
3. Organizing Home and Community Care around LHIN Sub-regions
A third advantage is the legislation’s shift to organizing delivery of home and community care around a LHIN sub-region, with consistent, service providers.
Our capacity plan research told us that people’s social, cultural and economic status often varies significantly between our neighbourhoods. So having care providers who are familiar with their patients’ neighborhood and its existing support resources (provincially funded and others) helps ensure successful home and community care delivery.
We also know that having a minimum number of consistent service providers who interact with our teams and patients/families builds strong relationships. Furthermore, this approach helps create high performing teams, whether virtual or in-person, in each patient’s circle of care.
With a goal of being able to identify local resources, numerous CCACs have begun reorganizing their care coordination and service provider teams around these LHIN sub-regions.
In our region, we’ve reorganized patient care around neighborhoods, so that patients, like Betty and Patty, can receive the services they need from consistent providers, who know their community and are located near their home. Organizing services around LHIN sub-regions or neighbourhoods gives service providers a greater connection with the communities where they deliver care.
I believe there’s much to be gained through LHIN sub-region planning but it’s complex work and should be viewed as part of a long-term vision or marathon.
On the flipside, implementing Patients First also poses risks, which I believe health care leaders need to dodge. I will outline three of these risks in my next post.
What do you think? Are there opportunities I’ve missed or points you’d like to add? Please share your comments at the bottom of this post.
Caroline Brereton ON Care 