#Wound Care Services in Vancouver BC

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Respite Care Services in Pitt Meadows

Get quality respite care services in Vancouver with Hummingbird HHC. Let our compassionate team provide the relief you need. Call now for personalized care!

Get trusted respite care services in Pitt Meadows. Compassionate support for your loved ones. Contact us today for reliable and personalized care solutions.

Hummingbird Home Health Care (HHC) provides a wide range of compassionate, personalized services to seniors in Vancouver, Surrey, and surrounding areas, ensuring expert care in the comfort of their homes. Our offerings include meal preparation, grocery shopping, companionship, light yard work, and housekeeping to maintain a clean and healthy living environment. We also assist with daily tasks like running errands, wellness checks, and reminders, alongside trusted respite care, transportation arrangements, and expert medical services such as injections, wound care, palliative care, and post-operation recovery. With specialized insulin training, medication management, and personal care services, Hummingbird HHC ensures the safety, dignity, and well-being of seniors. Our walking programs and wellness initiatives keep seniors active and engaged, promoting independence and a high quality of life. Contact us today for reliable, compassionate care tailored to your loved ones' needs.

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Week One on the Job

I’ve finished my first week at the new job! I’m working on a hospitalist geriatric unit at Vancouver General Hospital. Its a locked unit and most of the patients have some degree of dementia. I’m a causal worker, which means I only work on an as-needed basis but I’ve got this job for the whole month of March. I share an office with two other women and the three of us all work together on discharge planning. The other two women both have nursing backgrounds and they handle setting up all the outpatient care, home care and facility placements (of which there are much fewer, I’ll get into that in a minute), my role is mostly assessing patients and families to see how they’re coping both in and out of the hospital and identifying resource needs. Its a lot less time on the phone than at Hopkins and I haven’t had to talk to any insurance reps, which I don’t miss at all, but its different working primarily with dementia patients. A lot of the patients (not all) have had long, happy, relatively healthy lives and are now just at the end of their life. Its different than working with patients who have been sick for much of their life, or have had very difficult lives, or all of the above. Of course there are still some patients like that as well, but much fewer than what I’m used to.

Ok, now for the nitty gritty social work stuff. Social work friends, this is for you! First of all, APS and guardianship cases are a whole different ballgame up here. I still don’t totally understand everything but basically there’s something called the Adult Guardianship Act that allows a person to be brought to and held in the hospital if they are being abused, neglected or self neglecting and are deemed to be unable to seek support and assistance on their own. There’s a similar act called the Mental Health Act that allows for someone with a mental illness to be brought and held in the hospital in order to prevent “substantial mental or physical deterioration”; they don’t have to be considered a danger to themselves or others. Basically its easier to hold people against their will in the hospital if they aren’t taking care of themselves. Also there are no APS workers like in the US, the social workers at the hospital do the investigation and determine if there is abuse, neglect, or self neglect and arrange for follow-up community care. So there’s no sitting on the phone for an hour and a half describing the extend of an 80lb patient’s wounds to try to get someone to fucking show up and start an investigation. They still have capacity assessments, which are pretty much the same as in the US, and if a person lacks capacity than a decision maker has to be appointed and if there is no surrogate decision maker the court will appoint a public guardian, so that’s all the same, but its interesting to see a system that allows for a lot more power on the part of the healthcare professionals to determine what is best for the patient. There was a recent case in BC where a woman was held against her will in the hospital for a year due to suspicions by the hospital staff that the woman, who was intellectually disabled, was being sexually abused. In that case the hospital also didn’t disclose to the patients family that she was being held in the hospital, so they didn’t know where she was (which is legal) and the hospital denied the patient access to a lawyer (which is not legal). So that’s a pretty bad example of the system over reaching, but on the other hand you don’t have to wait for APS to get around to investigating cases and if someone is self neglecting to the point of nearly killing themselves you can more easily try to intervene. I’ll have to see it in action more before I decide if I think its a better system or not. As someone who leans pretty heavily on the side of patient autonomy I’m a bit suspicious, but I’ll see.

But its not all guardianship and neglect cases, thank god, there’s also your regular discharges. Remember when I said there aren’t a lot of facility placements? Yeah, there really aren’t! They will keep people in the hospital for a few days or even a week in order for them to get enough PT to go home, and you can get WAY more home care services. Like four times a day! And not just PT/OT and nursing, you can also get home care aids. They do pretty much everything short of 24 hour care to keep people out of facilities. Of course that means its hard to qualify for a facility and when you do qualify you often have to sit on a waitlist for several months (unless you can pay privately to go to a non-subsidized facility, its still a two tiered system) but how many times did I have someone tell me they’d literally rather die than go to a nursing home? And there’s no sending people to facilities for IV antibiotics either, they do the treatment in the hospital if they can’t go home with a line. Not surprisingly this all means that length of stay is longer, though I don’t have the actual numbers to quote. But people being in the hospital for a few weeks isn’t a big deal and on a 30 bed unit its considered a busy day when six people get discharged.

Now about those 30 beds. Capacity is a problem. My first day on the unit we had 37 people on what should be a 30 bed unit. They have two to three people in a room unless someone is on isolation precautions. That’s not every unit of course, their palliative unit for example is all private rooms, but it definitely seems like things are more crowded.

The biggest difference, though, is a shocker. Like my jaw almost dropped. Someone had briefly mentioned it in my interview but it was so unbelievable that I didn’t even process the sound. Two words: paper charts. They have paper fucking charts. There are HANDWRITTEN NOTES! Just how impractical is this? Well, only one person can read notes on a patient at a time, and if someone locks a chart in their office on accident no one can read that patients notes or add more notes to the record. Plus, again, some of the notes are hand written, which for all practical purposes means they might as well not be written at all since they are completely illegible (I type all my notes because I’ve seen my handwriting and even I can’t read it and lets not even get started on my spelling). And do you want to find the social work assessment note from three admissions ago? Have fun finding that in medical record! Its truly insane, like going back in time. I’ve been told an electronic system is coming next year, but wow. I have no words.

One more super nerdy social work thing and then I promise I’ll end this post. Folks might remember that one of my favorite things to do at Hopkins was to tell the residents what a Medicaid spenddown is and then watch the horror wash over their faces. They don’t do that here! When you go to a nursing facility you do have to pay a portion of the cost, but the portion you pay is based on your INCOME not your ASSETS. So you don’t have to burn through all your savings when you go to a facility, you just have to pay a percentage (and I think its a pretty high percentage, like 80%) of your earned income, and if that would be considered a financial hardship you can apply for a reduced rate. So people aren’t signing over their whole social security checks to assisted living facilities either. This all applies to government subsidized facilities, of course. Like I said above you can pay privately for services and I’m sure private pay services are often better, but the point is that people who can’t afford to do that aren’t left with nothing. Its pretty great.

Those paper charts though...

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Hummingbird Home Health Care provides complete respite care to give you a much-needed break. Our experienced nurses offer temporary relief for attendants, ensuring your loved ones receive exceptional care while you take time for yourself.

Our professionally trained nurses create care plans to fulfill individual needs. We look after everything from medication management to medical treatments with professionalism and empathy. We understand the demands of caregiving and are here to support you and your family members. With our respite care services, you can feel secure that your family member is in good hands. Our mission is to make the healing process smooth and stress-free, allowing you to renew and return to your routines feeling refreshed.

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