Reduced falls, enhanced life quality key results
Wednesday May 25, 2011 -- Kristian Partington
 
Serious injury as a result of falls among Ontario’s aging population costs the provincial treasury an estimated $1 billion a year, according to Brent Chambers, director of health care partnerships with Revera Living.

During the Ontario Gerontology Association’s annual conference at the beginning of May, Chambers presented compelling evidence indicating that standardization of physiotherapy services can help prevent falls in long-term care homes and retirement residences, enhancing residents’ quality of life and saving precious health care funds.

Early in 2008, Revera began the process of defining best practices in terms of physiotherapy and rehabilitation in its 128 long-term care and retirement residences throughout Ontario.

By the beginning of 2010, the Revera Rehab program had been fully implemented and the process, which streamlined care among three physiotherapy providers, as opposed to 23 under the previous system, has yielded significant results in terms of fall prevention.

Chambers says the Ontario data was analyzed and compared to data from Revera homes in the rest of the country with similar documentation processes.

“There’s a definite better outcome in terms of falls resulting in serious injuries in Ontario long-term care versus the rest of Canada, and it was much more pronounced when you looked at the retirement residences,” says Chambers.

In Ontario, residents in retirement homes qualify for publicly-funded physiotherapy services, which is not the case in other provinces.

He says part of the program’s success of the program can partly be attributed to the fact that physiotherapists from one of the three partner providers are now involved in resident-care planning right from the outset.

“They brought their expertise, not only in terms of providing therapy for the residents but education to the staff on how to get residents up and about, and how to do safe transfers,” says Chambers of the physiotherapists involved in developing the new program,

He says the evidence shows the value of publicly-funded rehabilitation services and makes a compelling case for standardization in the sector in other provinces.

Based on the initial success, Revera intends to roll out the program at its sites across the rest of the country.