Jun 19, 2024 | Faces of HDGH
Every June, the province of Ontario recognizes our older adult population by dedicating the whole month to seniors with a different yearly theme identified alongside it. In honour of Ontario’s Seniors Month 2024 “Working for seniors”, Hotel Dieu Grace Healthcare (HDGH) would like to recognize its Specialized Geriatrics portfolio, and highlight the meaningful work these programs provide for seniors, and their formal/informal care partners within our community.
Here at HDGH, we have both inpatient and outpatient supports for our older adult population. Specialized geriatric programs are designed to help avert/decrease hospitalization stays and support clients to remain/transition safely back to their home/LTC within the community. Services are designed to provide specialized assessments that may support a diagnosis, education for capacity building, increased coordination and collaboration between care systems, and ensuring people have access to the services and resources that suit their needs best.
The specialized expertise of its staff is used to provide a time-limited continuum of specialized interdisciplinary services to support the client, and their informal/formal care partners both here at HDGH, and also in the community where they live. Our programs utilize the expertise of 5 Social Workers, 6 Nurses, 2 Nurse Practitioner’s, an Occupational Therapist, a Physiotherapist, a Kinesiologist, Behaviour Navigator, Psychogeriatric Resource Consultant, an Elder Life Coordinator, and a Dietitian. Along with our specialized allied and nursing teams, our amazing secretarial trio steer these ships and support our day to day operations and clinics alongside the three Geriatricians, and our Geriatric Psychiatrist/psych residents.
HDGH is also the host organization for Provincial Geriatrics Leadership Ontario (PGLO) and the Regional Geriatric Program- South West (RGP-SW) for Erie St. Clair. PGLO represents and convenes a provincial network that plans, designs and delivers clinical geriatric services and seniors’ mental health services, called Specialized Geriatric Services (SGS). SGS are coordinated by regional partners that are called Regional Geriatric Programs (RGPs) or Regional Specialized Geriatric Services (RSGS). All RGPs and SGS entities provide strategic and operational leadership for the implementation of clinical geriatric services region-wide, and work with local community and health partners to:
Our SGS Portfolio here at HDGH works hard to advocate, educate, support, and navigate the challenging medical and social ecosystem post-pandemic for their patients and/or their care partners daily to ensure they have what they need for their overall well-being and independence. A warm heartfelt thanks goes out to these teams, for ALL the work they do daily- we appreciate you!