The calls we take about stopping service are almost never complaints.
They sound like this. A residence has a room available on the first of the month. A daughter is standing in a hospital corridor because her father is going to rehab for six weeks and she cannot work out whether to keep paying for a pendant sitting in an empty house.
Those calls deserve the same answer no matter who picks up the phone. So here is ours, written down where anyone can read it before they call.
Bedford Medical Alert® is Canadian owned and operated, and the monitoring centre that answers a pressed button is in Canada, 24 hours a day. The account side is here too. That matters more than it sounds when someone needs an account changed quickly, because nothing in this article involves waiting for a head office in another country to open.
The three changes families actually call us about
Almost every change-of-circumstance call falls into one of three situations.
A move into a retirement residence or a long-term care home. An extended stay in hospital or rehab. And a change in who is doing the caring, usually an adult child moving in or a parent moving in with them.
None of these are the customer’s fault, and none of them should cost anybody a penalty. That is worth saying out loud because the medical alert industry has not always behaved that way, and people arrive at the conversation braced for a fight.
The plan terms, in one short section
This ground is covered properly in our post on medical alert systems in Canada with no contract, so here it is in brief, and then we will get to the situations.
Plans are month-to-month or annual, at the customer’s choice. There is a three month minimum at the start. There are optional six or twelve month initial-term savings if someone wants them, and after any initial term the service always reverts to month-to-month. There are no long-term contracts and there are no cancellation fees. Equipment is included with the subscription rather than sold separately, which is the detail that shapes most of what follows.
If it is the monthly number rather than the exit terms you are weighing, the costs and coverage post is the better read.
Moving into a retirement residence or long-term care
This is the most common one, and it is the one where people most often assume they are trapped.
They are not. Because the plan reverts to month-to-month, ending service around a move date is an account change and nothing more.
The part worth thinking about is what the new building actually covers. Retirement residences and long-term care homes generally have their own call system built into the suites, and Bedford builds those systems too. Our institutional and nurse call work is a separate stream from the consumer products, and if you want to understand what that hardware does inside a building, our post on nurse call systems in Ontario walks through it.
Two questions are worth asking the residence before you cancel anything at home. Does the in-suite call system cover the resident when they are away from their own room, in the dining room, the garden, the hallway? And what happens when they leave the property for an appointment or a family visit?
Some families cancel the in-home system and keep a mobile pendant or watch for exactly that reason, because a Go Anywhere device travels with the person while a building’s call system does not. Others cancel outright. Both are fine. What we ask is that nobody cancels on the assumption that a new building covers a scenario it does not.
Not sure whether to cancel, downgrade, or switch streams before a move? Call us at 1-888-755-3055 and tell us the move date. We will tell you plainly what the building probably covers, what it probably does not, and what your options cost. If ending service is the right answer, there is no fee for it.
A hospital stay, rehab, or a few months away
If someone is going to be in hospital or rehab for weeks, they are in a monitored environment and the equipment at home is not doing anything. What we will not do is pretend to know your case from an article: the right way to handle an absence depends on how long it is and which stream you are on, and it is a two minute conversation with someone who can see the account. Same for a snowbird winter, a long visit with family in another province, or a stretch where an adult child has moved in and is there overnight.
The equipment comes back, because it was never sold to you
Equipment is included with the subscription. That is one of the reasons Bedford does not charge a device fee up front, and it is why ending service involves a return rather than a resale.
What comes back depends on the stream. Home Freedom is a base unit plus the pendant. A Go Anywhere pendant comes back with its charger, and so does the Go Anywhere watch. Silver Shield is the non-wearable radar sensor set, so it is the sensors and their power supplies.
We arrange the return with you rather than the other way around. We provide a prepaid return label for equipment return from anywhere in Canada. Ask on the closing call and we will tell you exactly what needs to come back for your specific setup.
Questions worth asking any provider, not just us
If you are reading this while comparing providers rather than while ending a service, these are the four questions that separate a fair agreement from an expensive one. They are all about the exit, which is the part nobody reads carefully when they are worried about a parent falling.
Is there a cancellation fee, in any circumstance, including inside an initial term? Does the plan revert to month-to-month automatically, or does it renew for another full term unless you act? Is the equipment included, or have you bought hardware you now own and cannot return? And if the answer to a life change is “you can pause”, who confirms that in writing?
Ask them in that order. The answers tell you a great deal about how a company will behave on the worst day of your year.
Bedford has been doing this long enough to have taken all three of these calls many times over. We are an OCSA member, our equipment is in Canadian homes and Canadian care buildings, and we have supported hospital education programs and research initiatives from UHN Toronto Rehab to Trillium Health. Our Google rating sits at 4.9 stars. None of that is because of clever contract language. It is because the terms are simple enough to explain in one section, as above, and because the reasons families choose us hold up when the relationship ends as well as when it starts.
Whether you are ending service or starting for the first time, the terms are the same and so is the phone number. Call 1-888-755-3055 to talk to someone in Canada about your account, or read what is included with Home Freedom, our in-home pendant and base system. No long-term contracts, no cancellation fees, and equipment included with the subscription.
