St. Joseph's Health Care London will be offering more help to people caring for ill family members outside of the hospital, thanks to a three-year funding boost.
Hospital officials announced on Tuesday they would be receiving $750,000 a year for the next three years from the Change Foundation to develop local programs and resources for family caregivers.
"Sometimes in the health care system, family caregivers get left behind a little bit and we forget they have care needs in order to better serve their loved ones, " said Dr. Gillian Kernaghan, president and CEO of St. Joseph's Health Care London. "This will allow us to put a project team together and implement initiatives across our organization and into the community with our partners."
The funds will be used to create a communications resource toolkit, new education and support initiatives, and to provide formal caregiver assessments.
"The focus of this is not to shorten someone's stay in the hospital," said Dr. Kernaghan. "It's to make sure that the families feel ready when the person is ready to go home. They feel well equipped to take the person home and care for them."
St. Joseph's is one of only four health care institutes across the province to be selected for the foundation's new Changing Care program. Hospitals in Huron, Toronto, and Cornwall will be allotted the same amount of funding through the initiative.
"We put a call out for proposals across the province. We had 73 applications, which was a lot for us. We narrowed it down to 12 and asked them to do a full proposal. We then did a site visit to each of the 12 and picked four," said Cathy Fooks, president and CEO of The Change Foundation. "We were looking for organizations that were very interested in trying to make the experience better for family members as they were joining a family member through care. St. Joseph's had a remarkable commitment to making that process better for families."
The Change Foundation is an independent health policy think-tank in Ontario created in 1995.