MONCTON – A group that cares for terminally ill patients in New Brunswick says the province isn’t providing equal access to end-of-life care.
The New Brunswick Hospice Palliative Care Association (NBHPCA) wants New Brunswick to adopt a provincial strategy for hospice palliative care that includes better training and pay for personal support workers, sustainable funding for residential hospices and equal access to this care across the province.
Currently, access to palliative care depends on where you live. In Saint John, there is a 10-bed residential hospice, but in Campbellton, there are only 16 palliative physician hours allotted per week, according to Dr. Pam Mansfield, clinical director of palliative care at the Moncton Hospital.
“Some areas in New Brunswick, like here in Moncton, you have a full-service, community palliative care team,” she said. “Other areas in New Brunswick, like the Miramichi for instance, there’s not a palliative-care physician that can go and visit patients in their home.”
She said part of the problem is the funding strategy for the operating costs at the hospice in Saint John. The government provides 45 per cent of the funds, while the community must fundraise the remaining 55 per cent each year, which holds back other communities from establishing their own residential hospices.
In Fredericton, a group is in the process of renovating a building into a hospice, but the source of the operating costs have not yet been finalized.
In Moncton, while there is a palliative care unit with seven beds at the Moncton Hospital — Mansfield says the spots can treat people in the “acute dying phase” — there is no residential hospice.
The Greater Moncton Hospice group has received a donation of a piece of land, but has yet to start a capital campaign to get the building off the ground.
Mansfield said the funding strategy needs to change.
“What the NBHPCA would like to see is that the funding for hospice is similar to how nursing homes are funded,” she said. “Seventy-five per cent of operational cost through government and 25 per cent in fundraising through the communities.”
She said it would actually save the government money because the current model has terminal patients, who could be better served by a hospice, taking up an acute care bed in a hospital.
“If you look at a hospital bed, it costs about $1,000 a day for a hospital bed,” Mansfield said. “If you look at a hospice bed, it’s about $300 to maybe $400 a day.”
She said it also provides them better care, because in hospitals there are rules about when you can eat and what you can eat and when family and friends can visit.
“A hospice-type setting, it’s very much based on you eat when you’re hungry, or when you want to eat,” she said. “Your family comes whenever they want to, it’s much more of a home setting.”
Sandy Carruthers is a volunteer for the Greater Moncton Hospice, an organization that provides formal training to its volunteers and the matches them with terminally ill people to provide assistance in their homes.
Carruthers said going through the experience of losing her parents made her want to volunteer to help other families facing the death of a loved one.
“Because of someone in our family having some training, they were able to pass away in the surrounding they wanted to, in the most comfortable way they could,” she said. “I saw the difference that made and the difference it made to our family.”
Carruthers has been volunteering with the organization for a year. She was matched with a terminally ill man to provide some relief to his wife on Wednesday afternoons, so she could do the weekly shopping.
Her goal was to make him and his family as comfortable as possible. She said after the man kept apologizing for always being in his flannel pajamas, Carruthers arrived to care for him in her own flannel pajamas to show him it didn’t matter to her.
She said even though she knew going into it that he was going to die, it was still difficult at his funeral.
“My heart just filled with love,” she said. “In the hospital they called me wife number two.”
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