Patients leaving Scarborough Health Network often go home with a team already attached. Through SHN@Home, a program the network runs in partnership with Bayshore HealthCare, a coordinator meets the patient and the family before discharge, the first home visit is booked while the patient is still in a hospital bed, and the patient is told the name of the person who will be knocking on the door. SHN’s own SHN@Home page describes the first week plainly: a phone call to confirm the patient got home safely, a visit on the first day, and someone checking in every day of that week.
That kind of structured handover is not what our operators usually hear about.
It also has an end date. This is an independent going home resource from Bedford Medical Alert®, written for Scarborough patients, families and discharge planners. Bedford has no relationship with Scarborough Health Network and no role in SHN@Home. Nothing here is medical advice and nothing here replaces what the care team tells you. This is the household side of the return home, written by a Canadian monitoring company whose operators take a lot of calls from Scarborough addresses.
SHN lists the roles that may appear on an SHN@Home team: care coordinators, nurses, personal support workers, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, speech-language pathologists, social workers and dietitians. The network also lists how the team keeps in contact, and the list is broader than home visits alone. Phone calls count. So does telemonitoring. So does connecting a household to community services such as Meals on Wheels, transportation and caregiver support programs.
The program is built to flex. SHN states that if a patient’s needs change, the care plan changes with them, and that if a patient has no family doctor or nurse practitioner, SHN@Home will work with them to find one.
There is a schedule underneath all of it. On the same page, SHN sets out a review at 8 weeks, a connection to a Care Coordinator for an assessment at 12 weeks, and a handover to community homecare at 16 weeks. SHN’s wording is that most patients are part of SHN@Home for up to 16 weeks.
Families write down the discharge date. They rarely write down the other one.
Sixteen weeks from a February discharge is early June. For four months a professional has been walking through the front door on a schedule, noticing the loose stair tread, noticing that mum is not eating breakfast, noticing the new bruise on a forearm. Then the schedule ends, the visits step down to whatever community homecare provides, and the household becomes the thing that notices.
The step down is not a failure of the program. It is the program working: the goal is a person who no longer needs daily professional eyes on them. What changes is who is watching, and at what hours. A family that plans for week seventeen during week two has an ordinary handover. A family that meets it cold finds out about the gap the hard way.
Ask the SHN@Home coordinator, early, what the plan looks like after the program ends. SHN publishes a 24/7 SHN@Home line on the program page, and the coordinator is the right person to answer this one.
Even during the sixteen weeks, a scheduled program covers scheduled hours. Nobody is standing in the hallway at 2 a.m.
That is the stretch of the day our operators hear about most: the walk to the bathroom in the dark, the first shower alone, the Sunday afternoon when the daughter who lives in Markham cannot get across town. A monitored button answers one narrow question during those hours, which is whether the person can reach help without reaching a phone. Our page on what happens when you press a medical alert button walks through the process end to end, including why the operator already knows who to call before anyone answers.
Automatic fall detection is worth understanding honestly before anyone buys it. It adds a second path to help for someone who cannot press a button, and no sensor on the market catches every fall, which is why the button stays the primary way to call for help. We explain the general mechanics on our page about how automatic fall detection works. For a household where a wearable is refused or forgotten, Bedford’s Silver Shield radar sensor is a different shape of answer: it watches a room without a camera and alerts the family contacts on protocols the family sets, rather than routing to a Bedford operator.
Working out who will be watching the house in the hours between visits, and after they stop? Call Bedford at 1-888-755-3055 for a complimentary consultation by phone. We will talk through the layout of the house, explain exactly what happens when the button is pressed, and build the response plan around the names and instructions your family wants on file. Easy Setup, and the equipment is included with the service.
Use the sixteen weeks. A person with professional visitors in the house has help on hand for exactly the jobs that get postponed.
Get the medication list reconciled, because hospital stays change prescriptions and the changes are the ones people forget. Several common drug classes affect balance and blood pressure, which is the subject of our page on medications that increase fall risk in seniors; a family doctor appointment is the right venue for that conversation. Get the grab bars and the raised seat installed while an occupational therapist is still visiting and can say where they go. Move what lives on high shelves down to waist height.
And if a monitoring service is going in, install it early rather than at the handover. We would much rather the first press be a practice call on a quiet weekday, perhaps with a physiotherapist or a family member standing beside the person, than a real one in month five.
SHN’s Seniors Health page is worth a read for the same reason. It describes the Hospital Elder Life Program, which uses an Elder Life Specialist and trained volunteers to reduce delirium and functional decline during a stay, and mobility work under the names End Pyjama Paralysis and Move and Play. SHN also states that it is recognized as an Age-Friendly Health System, Committed to Care Excellence, by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
SHN was formed in 2016 from the merger of The Scarborough Hospital and the Centenary site of Rouge Valley Health System, and took its current name in 2018. It runs three full-service hospitals for a community the SHN Foundation puts at over 850,000 residents: General on Lawrence Avenue East, which opened in 1956 and is the oldest and largest of the three, Centenary at 2867 Ellesmere Road, opened in 1967, and Birchmount at 3030 Birchmount Road in Agincourt, opened in 1984 as Scarborough Grace. A new Northpine Emergency Department is under construction at Centenary, so allow extra time for parking if you are visiting.
Bedford ships and supports equipment across Scarborough and the rest of the GTA, and setup does not require an installer in the house. Service is month-to-month after a three-month minimum at the start, with no cancellation fees. Some households qualify for third-party funding through a range of programs, and Bedford is as likely as any other provider to be approved, though the applications themselves generally come through a case worker and Bedford cannot take on that paperwork. Our broader coming home from the hospital guide covers the first days back for any discharge.
Families whose stay was at a Lakeridge Health site in Durham Region rather than at Scarborough Health Network will find the same going-home material on our Lakeridge Health discharge page. The household side of Durham Region itself, from the OSCC55+ week to the DRT booking window, is on our Oshawa and Durham Region page.
Stating it once more: Bedford Medical Alert is an independent Canadian company. It is not a partner, vendor, contractor or endorsed supplier of Scarborough Health Network, and it has no involvement in SHN@Home. Every description of SHN on this page comes from SHN’s own published material and is attributed as such. Bedford is a member of the Ontario Community Support Association, holds a 4.9-star Google rating, has supported hospital education programs and research initiatives from UHN Toronto Rehab to Trillium Health, and brings three generations of experience to what it does. None of that constitutes a relationship with SHN.
Choose a monitoring provider the way you would choose any other service for the house: on what it actually does at 2 a.m., and on whether you can leave it when you want to.
If someone is coming home to Scarborough and you want the monitoring settled before the home care ends, see Home Freedom in-home systems or call 1-888-755-3055. Canadian operators, 24/7, following the response plan your family sets. Equipment included, month-to-month after the initial term, and no cancellation fees.
