All I want for Christmas is some home care!

Just a note to send along our best wishes at Christmas and to say we hope the new year is blessed with good health and better times.

Christmas is certainly different this year. Part of it is the lingering hangover from pandemic days. Last year at this time the gravy was getting cold while families fought over the dangers of isolation and whether vaccinations and masks should be mandatory.

This year, politics are focused on the shortage and high cost of food, the crisis in housing and health care and increasing hatred and violence in the world.

 “Merry Christmas” becomes harder to say when there is so much misery around us. My own recent encounter with the health care system provided our family with a bird’s eye view of some of the humongous problems we face on that one issue alone.

Suffice it to say it was an interesting experience and I will refrain from easy criticism because there are so many working their hearts out under pitiful conditions and they deserve to be encouraged rather than reminded just how bad things are.

Patients’ families also pay a high price. Over several days I watched how the stress, worry, obvious shortages in staff and equipment in the system and fear of the unknown took its toll on families and friends.

 Bone-weary front-line workers are covering long shifts to meet standards of hygiene and care---not always hitting the target. Patients and staff are shuffled about like chess pieces to make maximum use of every bed, space, piece of equipment or operating room.

An anonymous surgical team of creatures wrapped in enough plastic to cover a football field completes a procedure that may take hours and then the facility is prepared by staff to receive the next cast of characters being wheeled in. 

Lucky are those whose numbers have come up. The waiting lists grow longer by the days.

Compared to the complexity of life and death procedures that take place in every hospital every day, my recent experience took only a few hours to complete.

Basically, a surgeon was making adjustments to vertebrae with the end game of pain relief and preventing  further deterioration. Enough said.

Fear of the unknown is the toughest part. Husband Fred is a take-control kind of guy and while he underwent open heart surgery many years ago, he calmly slept through most of that one.

He was mightily grateful and impressed that my hospital stay would be limited to just a few days and he was assured that home care would be provided. He can fix a toaster or disentangle a fishing line and a string of Christmas lights. But health care? Fergitaboutit.   

 Whoever drafts the material for patients and their families on the merits and availability of home care should get the Nobel Prize for fiction.

 It is impossible to describe the joy of the day of our escape from hospital. Goodbye sinister hospital gown. Hello to some hot coffee and return to normalcy.

All we needed was a home care worker who would change the bandage according to doctors’ orders.

 My husband spent most of a whole day talking to a squad of home care experts, agencies and government offices who patiently described the benefits and reliability of their programs.

For the first few hours he was shuffled back and forth among the various players. They all wanted to be helpful but it would be some time      before anyone would be available. 

After numerous transfers and disconnects it was all too apparent the home care system has been well researched and seems to have no shortage of officials with great ideas and are true disciples of home care and its benefits.

Many of the agencies on the list of home care providers have impressive business models in place---but it became painfully obvious that there is an abundance of managers and promoters but actual boots on the ground were as scarce as hens’ teeth. 

There were protocols to be followed. Forms to fill out. Travel times to consider. Juggling of work schedules and enough data to choke a horse.  

Did I mention that the task at hand in my case was removing and replacing a bandage on an incision that fortunately was healing well and was no cause for concern beyond fear of dying from old age before the home care began.

 This story has a happy ending. My husband is a sharp guy and concluded that the battle to secure home care was more difficult than imagined. You have to cut out the pleading with managers with big titles and little solutions. Lots of apologies but few commitments.

He made a decision on his own and it paid off.  “It’s okay…everyone keep calm…I’ve got a glove on this…they won’t be taking us alive  ….help is on the way.”

He had succeeded where others failed.

Cheers all around. 

Soon, our kitchen door opened and there appeared my lifelong neighbour and good friend (we’re talking pre-kindergarten here) and long retired as a registered nurse.  Cool as a cucumber, she went to work, my husband’s heart rate returned to normal, I had a brand new bandage and our own Florence Nightingale accepted our thanks and disappeared into the night.

Many lessons were learned. In these days when health care workers have become our most valuable resource and those shortest in supply, we need fewer people filling out forms, duplicating background questions and writing reports.

Piles of reports by experts about health care reform sit on desks across the country. Some have been highly praised but show me the action it has produced.

The public cries out for change. While I’m whining about the frustration dealing with homecare, millions of Canadians are without access to family doctors, waiting months or even years for diagnostic tests, treatment and surgery. 

Should it really be that hard to get someone who can change a bandage? Apparently so.

 It’s one thing to get ourselves out of this current health care crisis. It took years for this mess to develop and it will take decades to try to catch up and make sure we don’t just repeat old mistakes. 

 Many are rightly mad as hell and say they won’t take it anymore.

They should begin by demanding to know what happened to all those studies and recommendations that sit on the desks of politicians and various experts (including health care professionals themselves) and go nowhere.

Today’s “brilliant idea” to fight disease and salvage health care can grab headlines and raise the hopes of patients and investors.  Just as quickly,  critics with their own agenda can move in and destroy innovation and change.

We need to be mindful that governments and special interest groups change and take their headlines, priorities, lobbyist friends, supporters, career aspirations and promises with them. 

One of the biggest enemies of progress in health care is lack of vision, a fear of change and innovation and a failure of the people who operate the system to abandon the well- established turf wars that put personal gain ahead of the public interest.  

Healthcare policy is ripe with politics. Trying to avoid or deny that is like whistling in the wind. 

Governments at all levels have a voice in where a health care institution will be situated. In whose jurisdiction will the facility and jobs be located? In other words, which politicians will get the credit and perhaps influence the outcome of the next election?

In smaller communities, the local hospital is often the lifeline of the local economy.

If two or more neighbouring jurisdictions are competing for the same institutions the battle can be brutal. Property values, economic development the ability to attract staff (especially specialists) and equipment will be pawns very much at play. 

And so goes the health care debate and how its roots run deep in our communities both small and large.

Every member of the community has so much at stake in making sure our policy makers fix today’s problems and prepare ourselves for older and larger populations, burgeoning costs and more complex health issues in the months and years ahead.

It is not a subject for the faint-hearted. Get in your two cents worth before the gravy gets cold.