Health Quality Council of Alberta grades high in survey

By GILLIAN SLADE on December 3, 2019.

gslade@medicinehatnews.com@MHNGillianSlade

The Health Quality Council of Alberta has revealed there is a fairly high rate of satisfaction with home care services, according to the results of its survey released recently.

Across the province home care clients gave the service an 8.3 out of 10. In urban settings the rate was 8.5 and in rural districts 8.7.

There was a 59 per cent response rate to the survey, which equates to 6,914 clients.

The respondents rate the professional services from staff and the personal care they provide very highly with the provincial average being 86 per cent. The numbers dropped significantly when asked in the survey if they were very happy with the number of different staff providing home care services. The provincial average was 42 per cent.

Currently there are about 83,000 Albertans receiving home care services, representing an increase of 10,000 since the last home care survey in 2014/15.

Personal care services are typically provided by Alberta Health Services, or by service providers contracted by AHS, such as healthcare aides and can include providing personal hygiene, dressing, toileting and incontinence management and mobilization or transferring.

Survey respondents identified five unmet service needs including housekeeping, grounds keeping, grocery assistance, bathing and therapies.

One survey respondent in particular noted what is not provided.

“…I depend on family and private agencies. Professional agencies are paid by me”.

Others talked by how scheduling impacts them.

“They change the times for my services frequently and without asking or letting me know about changes. This makes it very hard for me to schedule appointments and to be ready when they arrive.”

“They arrive at different times. We can handle a little variation of arrival time like 15 or 30 minutes, but when it’s two hours that’s too hard an adjustment for us,” said another.

This was the second HQCA survey about home care and was done to obtain feedback from seniors who are long term supportive and maintenance clients to identify opportunities for improvement.

About 80 per cent of home care clients are seniors and 72 per cent are long-term supportive and maintenance clients.

For home care a “case manager” assesses each client and creates a care plan for them. They are responsible for managing and coordinating the delivery of client care. The survey revealed that 82 per cent of Albertans receiving home care know their case manager.

While Medicine Hat is often considered “rural” by the province – for this survey it is considered “urban”.

HQCA tallied the responses for the entire province, then for metropolitan cities such as Calgary and Edmonton, urban centres with a population of more than 25,000 people and less than 500,000 and finally rural centres with less than 25,000 people and/or an area that is more than 200 kilometres from a metro or urban centre.

The full results of the survey are available online:

Alberta Seniors Home Care Client Experience Survey results released

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