UPDATE: Consistency of Home Care Personnel Under Managed Competition: A Case Study from Ontario (Shortened Version Presented at the Knowledge to Wisdom Conference)

Measuring Consistency of Personnel in Home care: Current Challenges and Findings Consistency of personnel is important to ensuring continuity of care for home care clients. It is particularly important to those clients who are at high risk for adverse effects when provider changes occur. Information about the extent to which clients experience consistency of personnel is difficult to collect in Ontario. It resides with individual provider agencies rather than with the Community Care Access Centres (CCACs) that arrange service delivery. We will present findings from the Continuity of Care in Home Care study which obtained information directly from service provider agencies on the number of providers that 500 CCAC clients saw. These clients received either nursing or homemaking services or both. Factors linked with the mean number of providers experienced by a client and with the total number of providers experienced by a client during up to a year of service delivery will be highlighted. Factors affecting the frequency of provider changes will be discussed along with the implications of our findings for clients, service providers, agencies and policy makers.