Guidance for families usually begins on the morning someone leaves the hospital. Lakeridge Health publishes something about the days before that, and it is worth reading before a homecoming anywhere in Durham Region.
Bedford Medical Alert® is an independent Canadian monitoring company. We are not affiliated with Lakeridge Health, we have no role in its discharge process, and every hospital detail below comes from Lakeridge Health’s own website. Nothing here is medical advice. The clinical side of going home belongs to the care team.
On its Plan Your Stay pages, Lakeridge Health runs a campaign called End PJ Paralysis. It describes a global movement to help patients get up, dressed and moving, and it asks patients to wear their own clothes on the ward instead of a hospital gown. Gowns are still required for surgeries and for diagnostic imaging such as X-rays and MRI scans. The hospital ties the rest of it to dignity and respect, which it names as key components of its Guiding Principles of Partnership.
The reason is a word the hospital uses without softening it. Deconditioning. Lakeridge Health defines it as physical deterioration: muscle weakness, loss of muscle mass, and loss of the ability to do routine things like getting dressed or going to the bathroom without help. The same page states that deconditioning contributes to longer stays in hospital.
Two numbers sit on that page, and Lakeridge Health names a source for each. Ten days of bed rest in hospital leads to the equivalent of 10 years of aging in the muscles of people over 80, which the hospital cites to a 2004 paper in the Journal of Gerontology. And one study found that 60 per cent of immobile older patients had no medical reason that required bed rest, which it cites to Graf 2006 in the American Journal of Nursing.
Now read those with a discharge date in mind.
A stay does not have to be dramatic to change what somebody can manage at home. A person admitted through an emergency department for a chest infection can be medically better within the week and still come home with noticeably less in their legs than they left with. The discharge summary reports that the infection cleared. It does not report the stairs.
Lakeridge Health runs five hospitals: Ajax Pickering, Bowmanville, Oshawa, Port Perry and Whitby, with four emergency departments, three critical care units, a long-term care home called Lakeridge Gardens, more than 20 community health-care locations and a surgical centre inside the Jerry Coughlan Health & Wellness Centre. It is supported by a team of nearly 9,000 staff, physicians and volunteers, and it is a member of the Durham Ontario Health Team.
Lakeridge Health also publishes a packing list, and it is worth reading twice. Bring the Ontario Health Card. Bring mobility aids, medications, comfortable clothing, glasses or contact lenses, dentures, hearing aids, toiletries, and a phone with its charger. The hospital asks for shoes with a grip, and it encourages patients who use a wheelchair, cane or walker to bring their own for comfort and familiarity, with Staxi mobility chairs near the front entrances or available on request. Jewelry, cash and credit cards, scented products and latex balloons are asked to stay home. There is a printable one-page guide called Staying With Us on the same page.
That list does double duty as a home list. Grippy shoes, working hearing aids and clean glasses matter just as much in a hallway at two in the morning as they do on a ward. If a walker came home with the patient, ask the hospital’s physiotherapist whether it is set at the right height before the car leaves.
Working out what should be waiting at the house before somebody comes home from hospital? Call Bedford Medical Alert at 1-888-755-3055 and we will talk it through on the phone, with no obligation.
Lakeridge Health publishes a plain list of the professionals a patient might meet, and three of them shape how the first weeks at home actually go.
Physiotherapists, the hospital says, are dedicated to helping people regain mobility that has declined because of an injury, illness or aging, which is the deconditioning problem stated from the other direction. Occupational Therapists are described as helping people participate in their daily occupations, meaning the hobbies, errands, paid work and activities that make up a day. Social Workers, the hospital says, help patients and families navigate the health care system and provide information about community resources, which is the sentence to remember if nobody has yet mentioned home care.
Ask which of the three has seen the patient, and ask what each of them said about stairs, bathing and being alone.
Lakeridge Health publishes the escalation route too. Every area of the hospital has a Patient Care Specialist and a Patient Care Manager, and a patient or family can ask to speak with them if something is not getting resolved with the care team. Unit Clerks can direct a question to the right person. The hospital also describes its pharmacists checking that a prescribed dose is appropriate and that the medication ordered is the best choice, and recommending a change to the care team when it is not. Anyone leaving with a longer medication list than they arrived with should read our guide to medications that increase fall risk before the first refill.
Hospital wards are level and well lit, with handrails on the corridors and somebody within earshot. A house is quieter. There may be basement stairs, a step down to the garage, a rug inside the front door, and a bathroom at the other end of the hallway from the bed.
We are not going to rebuild the checklist here, because we already published one. Our coming home from the hospital page covers the first 72 hours room by room. The point worth adding is about timing. Strength lost over a long admission takes longer than a weekend to come back, so the risky stretch outlasts the attentive one. Meals and visits cluster in the first days. By the third or fourth week the calls thin out and the person starts trying things unassisted again.
Time spent on the floor after a fall is a problem of its own, and we cover the evidence on it in our long lie explainer.
We are Canadian-owned and operated, our monitoring staff are based in Canada, and Bedford brings three generations of experience to this work. Bedford Medical Alert is an OCSA member, is trusted by clinicians across Canada, and has supported hospital education programs and research initiatives from UHN Toronto Rehab to Trillium Health. None of that is a relationship with Lakeridge Health, and we are not claiming one.
We do one narrow thing. When somebody presses, an operator answers and follows a response plan the family wrote in advance: who gets called and in what order, what the person’s conditions are, whether there is a lockbox and where it is. Our monitoring protocols are more intricate than those of typical competitors because that plan is personalized.
Automatic fall detection is available on some devices. In general terms, sensors read sudden changes in motion and orientation and can raise an alert when nobody presses anything. We say the same thing about it on every page: no sensor on the market catches every fall, so it is a second layer rather than a promise. For a person who will not reliably wear anything in the early weeks home, our Silver Shield radar sensor is an option, with one caveat stated plainly. Silver Shield is not watched by Bedford operators. It runs on protocols the family sets and it alerts the family automatically, giving wellness visibility in the home without a camera.
The useful setup after a hospital stay is usually unglamorous: an in-home base unit and a pendant or wristband the person will actually wear, tested in the basement and the bathroom on the day it arrives. Equipment is included with the subscription, so there is no device to buy, and Easy Setup means there is nothing to install. Plans are month-to-month or annual, with a three-month minimum at the start and no cancellation fees, which matters while nobody yet knows whether this is a few months of recovery or a permanent change. Our Google rating sits at 4.9 stars.
If the person is walking to the store again by month two or back behind the wheel, an in-home unit is the wrong tool, and we would rather say so on the phone than after the sale.
If somebody is coming home from hospital with less strength than they went in with, our Home Freedom in-home system covers the house while the legs come back. Call 1-888-755-3055 and we will build the response plan with you over the phone.
