KEMPTVILLE-

KEMPTVILLE Ontarios health care system is failing patients and has systemic discrimination against the elderly, according to a recently released report on the state of provincial health service.

Pushed Out of Hospital, Abandoned at Home, a joint project between the Ontario Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists and the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, published the report after conducting more than 600 interviews with people who had experiences with the provincial health care system.

The interviews took place after patients and family members called a hotline the organizations had set up in 2011 and which was active for 15 months. In the 60-page report, a number of stories recount patients unfavourable experiences with the system.

Unfortunately, theres hundreds of these stories, said Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions of CUPE.

The commonality of these narratives is that primarily elderly patients are getting the short shift from the health care system.

Hurley said his group is consulting with a legal firm to find a way to charge the province with some sort of systemic discrimination on the basis of age.

This isnt so the courts will step in, but so that we can keep talking about this issue, he said.

The individual cases cited in the report detail harrowing encounters with the health care system, including an 86-year-old woman being sent home from the hospital with a cracked rib, an 87-year-old woman suffering a heart attack while in a waiting room for three hours, and multiple families threatened with huge fees by the hospital if their loved ones werent moved from the hospital to a long-term care facility.

Eighty-seven per cent of respondents said they felt seniors had been sent home from the hospital while still acutely ill. As well, the report found more and more acutely ill patients were in long-term care homes instead of in hospitals, where they would have been before the province cut 19,000 acute care beds.

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Report finds health care failing elderly