New Hotline designed to Help Elderly With Hospital Care
In Canada a hotline is being introduced to help enforce better hospital care for elderly individuals. Many elderly individuals are released prematurely from hospitals and are denied the vital care services they desperately need. This type of rush to get the elderly out can make the health ailments they suffer from worse or neglected.
Hospitals that suffer a bed shortage experience the pressure to move patients in and out as quickly as possible which tend to affect the quality of care that their own patients receive. The elderly patients are primarily the ones suffering because they are experiencing the form of rationing that the push to get them out has caused. This push occurs even when the elderly patients are clearly suffering serious ailments and are not well enough to leave. In Ontario over 18 thousand beds have been cut in the last 20 years. Although Ontario has the lowest population to bed ratio of any developed country, the problem still occurs in the United States. The campaign that is being launched across Canada will discuss the substandard care that the elderly are receiving in hospitals and will discuss a hotline that patients can call to share their experiences about their hospital stay. The creators of the hotline hope that it will encourage dialogue and stories in order to help create a report that can challenge the ongoing hospital bed cuts.
The elderly do not deserve any type of substandard care especially when they are supposed to be taken care of. Hospitals are obligated to take care of your loved ones, not compromise their health. A hotline like this can really help in ensure better care for the elderly and shed light on the solutions to these problems.
