Somewhere in the paperwork of a Hamilton hospital stay is a sentence that goes unread until the morning it matters. Hamilton Health Sciences puts it plainly in its own patient material: when you are well enough to leave, you are responsible for organizing and paying for your transportation home. Its pamphlet asks directly whether that includes visits to the Emergency Department, and answers yes. It also spells out that “home” means your residence, a retirement home, or a long term care home.
Bedford Medical Alert® is an independent Canadian monitoring company. We are not affiliated with Hamilton Health Sciences or with St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, and every hospital detail on this page comes from those organizations’ own published material, named as we go. What we can speak to from our own side of it is the part that starts after the car pulls away.
HHS describes itself as providing short term care, called acute care, and discharge as what happens when a patient no longer needs it. Its discharge planning material asks that the conversation start early in the stay, and that families be ready to leave in the morning, because the bed will be used right away by another patient waiting somewhere like the Emergency Department. Get the exact hour from the care team on the day, because HHS has published more than one figure over the years.
If nobody can collect the patient, HHS sets out two fallbacks and both of them cost money. You book and pay for a taxi yourself, or the health care team books Ontario Patient Transfer and you pay for it, either at the cashier’s office on the way out or by a bill that arrives at the house later.
One contrast is worth carrying with you. If the next stop is another hospital rather than home, the arrangement flips: the care team looks after the transportation and there is no charge to the patient or the family for a transfer between hospitals.
The smallest instruction in the HHS material is the one families most often miss. Bring clothing, shoes, a coat and house keys to the hospital before the day of discharge. House keys, in particular. Someone brought in by ambulance at two in the morning did not stop to think about the front door.
St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton is a separate organization from Hamilton Health Sciences, and in a city where both are simply called “the hospital” that causes real confusion on discharge day. St. Joseph’s runs three campuses: the Charlton Campus, an acute care site in downtown Hamilton at 50 Charlton Avenue East where its Emergency Department sits; the West 5th Campus, home to regional specialized mental health services; and the King Campus, an outpatient site on King Street East that houses St. Joseph’s Urgent Care Centre.
Why it matters: instructions, follow up appointments and phone numbers belong to whichever organization treated the patient, and the two do not share a switchboard. If the family is unsure which one they are dealing with, the letterhead on the discharge sheet settles it in a second.
If someone in your family is coming home from a Hamilton hospital this week and you are trying to work out what needs to be in place before the first night alone, call us at 1-888-755-3055. The consultation is complimentary and it happens by phone, so nobody has to be at the house for it. We will tell you honestly if the answer is that you do not need us yet.
Publicly funded home care in Ontario runs through Ontario Health atHome, and the single most useful thing about it is written on its own website: anyone can refer a patient. You, a family member, a caregiver, a friend, a physician, or another health professional. Families routinely wait for a hospital to begin something they were always allowed to begin themselves. Hamilton sits in the Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant region, and a postal code lookup on the Ontario Health atHome site names the right local office in a few seconds.
What can follow a referral includes care coordination, nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, social work, personal support, and medical supplies and equipment. Ask about the occupational therapy visit after a fall: an occupational therapist assesses the house rather than the patient, which is a different and very useful pair of eyes.
One program is worth naming while the patient is still in the building. Ontario Health atHome runs Rapid Response Nurses, short term intensive support aimed at the hospital to home transition and at avoiding an unnecessary return to hospital. Its published eligibility list reads like a description of half the people we set up: living at home or in a retirement residence, several complex medical issues, a change in the medication routine, a new and difficult diagnosis, or a limited support network. The route in is to ask the hospital based Ontario Health atHome care coordinator, which means asking before discharge rather than after. If you are a discharge planner or community nurse pointing families at any of this, our resources for nurses, clinicians and PSWs keeps the referral form and brochure in one place.
Here is the shape of the day we hear about most often. Discharge is in the morning. A son or daughter takes the time off, collects the parent, gets them settled with the kettle on, and is back at work by early afternoon. The next scheduled human contact might be tomorrow.
What hurts people in that window is the time spent on the floor afterwards, with the phone up on the counter and nobody due until morning. A monitored button shortens that wait to the length of one conversation. Our operators are in Canada, they answer around the clock, and they open a personalized response plan as the call connects, so they already know who to phone first, whether there is a key safe, and which neighbour keeps the spare set.
Automatic fall detection can add a second path to that call if nobody presses anything. In general terms it works by reading a sudden change in motion, and we explain the mechanics on our page about how automatic fall detection works. It is a backup to the button and never a replacement for it, and no sensor on the market catches every fall. We are not clinicians and this page is not medical advice. Follow the instructions your HHS or St. Joseph’s team gave you, and call them or the family doctor if something changes.
Bedford has supported hospital education programs and research initiatives from UHN Toronto Rehab to Trillium Health, and we are a member of the Ontario Community Support Association.
None of that makes us a partner, a preferred vendor, or an endorsed supplier of Hamilton Health Sciences or of St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, and this page should not be read that way. Neither organization has reviewed it. We would rather say so plainly than let a familiar logo do the implying. If a member of your care team recommends a specific provider, weigh that ahead of anything on this website, including this page.
Some of these calls end with us telling a family they have the next two weeks covered already and do not need us.
When that is not the situation, our in home system pairs a pendant with a base unit. Equipment is included with the subscription rather than sold separately, so there is no device to buy up front, and setup is easy. Plans run month to month or annually at your choice with a three month minimum at the start, after which service reverts to month to month, and there are no cancellation fees. That matters in the week after a discharge, when nobody yet knows whether this is a six week recovery or a permanent change. Monitoring is 24/7 and based in Canada, and families have rated us 4.9 stars on Google. Our guide to coming home from the hospital covers the first weeks in more detail, and the Hamilton page covers local funding and setup.
For families coming home in the Niagara region, our Niagara Health page covers that system’s five sites the same way.
See what an in home setup actually includes on our Home Freedom systems page, or call 1-888-755-3055 and describe the house. Tell us who is around in the evenings and which rooms the person will use, and we will tell you what we would put in that house and what we would leave out.
