In her first ever annual report, which will be released Thursday, Patient Ombudsman Christine Elliott says her office received approximately 2,000 complaints from patients, their families and caregivers between 2016 and 2017. She also asks hospitals, home-care agencies and long-term care homes to embrace the complaints process, which she says will lead to improvements in Ontario’s health-care system. “They want assistance with their own complaint, but they also want to make the system better, too.”The Ontario government created the Patient Ombudsman office in 2014 and the agency took its first complaint in July 2016. The report says that majority of the complaints fielded by the office, 70 per cent, related to Ontario’s hospitals, 20 per cent related to home care and 10 per cent were related to long-term care. While the province grapples with ways to make more space in long-term care homes, it could take some simple steps to avoid complaints related to discharge planning, she says.

Source: National Post November 09, 2017 09:00 UTC