A charter challenge of provincial legislation that permits hospitals to transfer patients requiring an alternative level of care to a long-term home will be discussed in a courtroom next week.
The Ontario Health Coalition and Advocacy Centre for the Elderly are behind the challenge.
Bill 7 was implemented in 2022 to help free up hospital beds.
The healthcare advocates feel it is discriminatory, especially toward the elderly.
“The patients who are targeted for this kind of treatment in hospitals are the elderly,” says Natalie Mehra, the Coalition’s Executive Director.
“They do not do this to help the young 30-year-olds who are in hospital. They do it to the elderly, and they have overridden their rights to informed consent, a right that every other patient in hospital enjoys or every other class of age enjoys.”
Mehra claims the legislation has impacted hundreds, if not thousands, of patients.
Jane Meadus, a lawyer for the Advocacy Centre, says discharge from hospital has become the biggest issue for their office, fielding as many as 800 calls a year.
“With the implementation of Bill 7, the callers, and whether they be the patient or their family members or substitute decision-makers, are absolutely devastated about what’s going on. They get confused. They don’t know what’s happening,” says Meadus.
She adds the bill has become a real threat to people.
Hospitals can charge patients $400 a day if they refuse to leave their hospital bed.
Mehra feels the use of the term alternate level of care is being misused.
“It’s abused. It’s misused. It is arbitrary. It’s not a clinical diagnosis. It’s an administrative term used to denote patients that they’re in a bed that they shouldn’t be in,” says Mehra.
An Ontario Superior Court judge will hear the case beginning on Monday.
