Montreal nurses denounce that a pilot project to simplify home care creates bugs and duplicate paperwork to complicate their task and reduce the quality of service provided to patients.
“We find ourselves doubling the workload, filling in statistics that give nothing to patients […]. And many do not receive care because of computer bugs,” laments nurse Isabelle Roy, president of the Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec (FIQ) union for the North Island of Montreal. .
Since last year, its integrated university health and social services center (CIUSSS) has been in a pilot project with the AyalaCare platform. This brings together in the same mobile application the patients to be visited and the care to be given.
In real time, it is possible to know which nurse is treating which patient.
20 minutes, no more
By default, visits should last 20 minutes.
“It does not take into consideration a patient who can be hard to prick, who must have compresses for 15 minutes, who has difficulty moving,” laments Ms. Roy.
There is also no time to assess how the person being cared for is doing and whether the elder who is losing his or her autonomy is able to meet his or her needs, continues his colleague Armando Coronel.
With this limited time, auxiliary nurses went from 10 to 16 home visits per day, the union maintains.
But the clinical nurses, who must ensure their coordination, make half as many visits due to the additional management of AyalaCare.
In mid-November, the platform was down for 24 hours, according to an internal email. Managers also asked caregivers to enter statistics on visits in another platform because “the risk of errors is high” in AlayaCare.
“We had to have everything on the phone,” says Isabelle Roy. However, forms are missing, and information on patients’ health status is insufficient in the platform, according to her.
The lack of home care and the little time devoted to patients have often been criticized in Quebec, notably by the Commissioner for Health and Well-being.
Seven pages for a single treatment
For Isabelle Roy, the solution lies in more staff and less paperwork.
“The form for wound care is now seven pages [de long]!»
For its part, the CIUSSS du Nord-de-l’île-de-Montréal responds by email that it is “in the midst of a digital transformation.” Even though he signed a contract worth more than $1.7 million with AlayaCare, according to the government’s tender system, he claims that the platform is not his project, but that of the Ministry of Health .
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