Aging & Social Change: Eleventh Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Hallway medicine across Canada shows the critical necessity to implementing and improving the management to resolve a problem in health care facilities. The contemporary model allows the implementation of an approach to clinical care to assess behavioral expressions in cognitively complex residents. Validation of the system’s effectiveness was in the qualitative and quantitative study, which took place at Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) facilities in Ontario, Canada, involving patients with mild to moderate NCD regardless of age during three year period. The study’s purpose was to deeply analyze hallway medicine issues by implemented Geriatric Outreach Service (GOS) and Behavioral Health (BH) program services to show reliability and validity of necessary structural changes with positive results covering different kinds of health facilities. Results: The GOS effectively minimized the patients’ referral, on its caseload, to the emergency department of HHS and St. Joseph Hospital, Hamilton, to 2.8%, to 1.4% to 0.8%, over the three years. The number of admissions from acute care hospitals to BH of the region was 5%-10% in 2016, 68% in 2017-2018, and 71% for the fiscal year 2019/2020. The number of admissions to BH from LTCH served by GOS has markedly decreased from 18%, 16%, and to 16% for years 2017/18, 2018/19, and 2019/20 respectively. Conclusions: The key components of an effective system to manage challenges of ‘Hallway’ medicine are Geriatric Outreach Service, Behavioral Health Service, Geriatric In-reach Service with innovative community partnerships, which is critical to resolving the quagmire of ‘Hallway’ medicine.