Doris Galloway, now 86, was living alone in Oshawa, just east of Toronto, when she fell in December, 2013. She lay on the floor for three days before police broke down her door at the urging of Mr. Le Blanc, who lived in Vancouver at the time. The 55-year-old has since quit his hospital telecom job, given up his west coast apartment and moved in with his mother to care for her around the clock as she sinks deeper into the grip of dementia.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
It is only two extra hours of help, but Terry Le Blanc is hoping that will be enough to keep his elderly mother out of a nursing home and to prevent him from succumbing to exhaustion as her sole live-in caregiver.
Beginning this week, the provincially funded agency that co-ordinates home care in Oshawa, Ont., will provide two more hours of personal support per week – including a bath – for Mr. Le Blanc's mother, Doris Galloway, an 86-year-old dementia patient who has been on a waiting list for more care at home since last fall.
"It's peace of mind that she's getting the hygiene care that's required," Mr. Le Blanc said. "I tell you the truth, I'm absolutely relieved."
Mr. Le Blanc, 55, found out about the enhanced personal support hours for his mother on Friday afternoon, just hours after The Globe and Mail published an investigation of Ontario's home-care system that featured Ms. Galloway as one of more than 4,500 people in the province on a home-care waiting list.
The Globe's investigation found that home care in Canada's largest province is plagued by underfunding, inconsistent standards of care and a lack of transparency that makes it virtually impossible for patients and their family members to determine what government-funded health care they are entitled to in their houses or in community settings such as assisted-living centres.
France Gélinas, the health critic for the Ontario NDP, said every member of the provincial parliament has heard stories like that of Mr. Le Blanc and his mother, but she predicts the general public will be "shocked and disgusted" to learn what home-care patients and their caregivers have been enduring.
"I have grown men crying their eyes out in my office, saying, "I love my mom, I can't cope, help me," she said. "Most people think of it as part of medicare. They think, if I need care, it will be there, and then it's not."
Until Friday, the last time the Central East Community Care Access Centre, the regional home-care co-ordination centre that covers Oshawa, had assessed Ms. Galloway's condition was in October of 2014.
Her care co-ordinator told Mr. Le Blanc at the time that his mother's health had deteriorated enough for her to qualify for four extra hours of at-home care per week, over and above the two, one-hour visits she was already receiving to help with bathing every Monday and Friday. But budget constraints meant the agency had not moved anyone off the waiting list and into care since June of 2014, a spokeswoman told The Globe this month.
Patients such as Ms. Galloway are supposed to be reassessed every six months. "It's been about nine months. I don't know why they were late," Mr. Le Blanc said. "I think the only reason we got this assessment was because [The Globe] asked questions."
A spokeswoman for the Central East CCAC confirmed by e-mail Sunday that Ms. Galloway was due for a reassessment visit in her home on April 30. "Unfortunately, due to a variety of unforeseen circumstances such as high admissions, crisis situations [and] demand for urgent home visits in the community … her reassessment was delayed."
When a care co-ordinator visited Ms. Galloway and her son on Friday, she found that Ms. Galloway's health had worsened slightly. Asked what year it was and what year she was born, Ms. Galloway answered both questions incorrectly, her son said. She had also begun to experience minor incontinence. Mr. Le Blanc, meanwhile, was suffering from caregiver stress after having given up his job and home in Vancouver to attend to his mother around the clock.
That led the home-care agency to grant Ms. Galloway an extra two hours of care, the spokeswoman said.
Gail Donner, a former dean of nursing at the University of Toronto and the chair of an expert panel that reported on Ontario's home-care system earlier this year, said that making public some basic standards of care would be a good place to begin fixing the system.
"We need to start with being clear with people about what we do. What will we provide? Under what circumstances? There's no such thing as eliminating all variability, because not every client is the same," she said. "[But] Transparency yields trust."