Half of the hospice beds in the Comox Valley are going to be temporarily closed as part of a contingency plan put in place for the end of COVID-era funding. During the pandemic, the province set up emergency funding to pay for contract nursing across the province. The plan was for that funding to end in 2025. However, as the deadline approached, Golden Life Management and Island Health were unable to find funds to continue with the contract nursing and have had to enact the contingency plan, which was to close hospice beds in order to maintain the level of long-term care beds in the Valley until the next fiscal year. After that, the beds can be reinstated if funding or staffing is secured. “The next step where we got involved was receiving a message from Island Health on Tuesday about this contingency plan that we knew nothing about,” said Comox Valley Hospice Society executive director Christine Colbert. “For us that was unacceptable. We really see those beds as community beds.” The hospice beds are at Aitken Community Hospice, which is owned and operated by Golden Life Management within the Ocean Front Village facility. The hospice society provides counsellors and volunteers to support the people in hospice and their families. “We know that the level of care that they get in hospice is different than what they would get in long-term care,” Colbert said. “Long-term care is not palliative care. They do palliative, end-of-life care, but hospice is a specialty place for that to occur.” The closure is supposed to be temporary, or until the end of the fiscal year in March. However, Colbert is worried that even a temporary closure will result in nurses and other staff leaving, and taking their expertise with them. “Our concern is, given the stress on the long-term care and given the stress on our acute care, that it may be all too easy not to get those beds back,” she said. Courtenay-Comox MLA Brennan Day wrote a letter to Health Minister Josie Osborne on Nov. 6, saying that the closure is “unacceptable.” Day says that the beds were cut as a “direct consequence” of the ministry’s overtime and contract nurse funding cuts. “The Aitken Community Hospice, which operates in partnership with the Comox Valley Hospice Society, will lose 50 percent of its capacity under this decision,” a release from Day’s office says. “Skilled hospice nurses have already warned they will not simply transfer into long-term care positions, meaning the province risks losing decades of experience in palliative care.” The Aitken Community Hospice was opened in 2022. At the time, it increased Comox Valley Hospice Society’s capacity from four beds to six beds. “The decision to take hospice beds offline to ‘preserve’ long-term care capacity is not a solution, it’s a symptom of a system in free-fall,” said Day. “End-of-life care deserves dignity, and that dignity is not found in a crowded hallway or shared room, nor in forcing families to take on this sacred work alone at home without support. That is unacceptable.” Day asked the minister to pause the cuts, reinstate admissions to the beds at Aitken and direct Island Health to review the decision making process. “Conflating hospice and long-term care funding is reckless and undermines the extraordinary work that the Comox Valley Hospice Society and its care team perform every day,” Day said in his letter to the minister. Colbert said that she is hoping a solution can be found, and that she values the relationship the society has with their partners in Island Health and Golden Life Management. “We want to come to a solution with them in good communications and good partnership,” she said. “But we also feel that those six beds are deserved and are needed for our growing an aging community and and we we are not accepting that.” Golden Life Management has been working towards hiring non-contract nurses, and have “done a tremendous amount of work within just the past couple of months, and we trust that will continue,” Colbert said. “It’s a funding issue, and so there is a solution,” she said.
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