This is not an official Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre discharge page. It is an independent guide written by Bedford Medical Alert®, a Canadian monitoring company. We are not part of Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre, we have no role in its discharge planning, and Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre did not write this page and does not endorse it. Questions about a discharge, a hospital program or who qualifies for one belong with your care team.
Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre stands on Georgian Drive, on the northeast side of Barrie. RVH describes itself as the regional location for specialty care, and lists cancer, heart, renal, child and youth, mental health and intensive care among its programs. What that regional reach means for families spread across Simcoe County is covered on our Barrie page, so it is not repeated here.
This page deals with one narrower thing. Going home from RVH in winter.
When a cold front pushes squalls in off Georgian Bay, Environment Canada puts out snow squall warnings for Simcoe County. CTV News Barrie has reported warnings of that kind that came with very poor visibility on the roads and police asking drivers to stay home. On a day like that, the son who drove up from the city every evening during the stay is not coming. Neither, possibly, is the daughter twenty minutes down the highway.
A plan for the first weeks at home that quietly assumes clear roads has a hole in it. Better to find the hole while the patient is still on the ward.
RVH publishes its own going home page, which explains that planning for the return home starts at admission, describes the follow-up phone call the hospital makes in the days after discharge, and introduces its RVH@home program. Read it there, along with whatever the unit gives you on paper. It is the hospital’s to explain, and it can change. Where this page and rvh.on.ca ever differ, go with the hospital.
Publicly funded home care after a hospital stay is coordinated by Ontario Health atHome, which lists a single North Simcoe Muskoka office, in Barrie. Our guide to home care after a hospital stay in Ontario explains how that coordination works and where a monitoring service sits beside it. Bring up home care with the care team early in the stay rather than on the last morning.
We are not a vendor to Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre, not an endorsed supplier and not part of the discharge. No partnership or referral relationship exists.
Our job is smaller and more specific. Bedford runs a monitored help button. Our operators, based in Canada, answer around the clock and work through a response plan the family wrote in advance, phoning the people on it in the order the family chose. A call from start to finish is laid out on what happens when you press the button.
Winter is a reason to read that order twice.
Call lists usually get built by relationship: the eldest first, then whoever tends to pick up. In January the useful question is who can physically get to the door when the 400 is closed. Someone who lives three houses along, with a shovelled path between the two front steps, may belong near the top for those months even if they sat at the bottom in July. If the order should be different for the winter months, call us and we will change it.
Is someone coming home from RVH this winter to a house where help could be slow to arrive in a storm? Call Bedford at 1-888-755-3055 and we will talk it through by phone at no charge: who belongs at the top of the call list on a squall day, which device suits the house, and whether it makes sense to start now or later. We cannot answer questions about the hospital, its programs or a discharge date; your care team can.
Most of a recovery happens indoors. Winter adds a handful of short trips that summer never asked for: down the side steps with the recycling, out to brush snow off the car, along a slippery driveway to the mailbox.
Our winter safety post covers boots, grit and clearing walkways using public health advice. Here the only question is the device.
An in-home system is built around the house. During Easy Setup we check, room by room, that the base unit can hear the button, and the far end of a long driveway is exactly where that range tends to give out. For someone who will be out past the porch, a Go Anywhere pendant or watch works on cellular and GPS signal wherever that signal reaches, and before one ships we check the signal at that specific address.
Silver Shield is different again. It is a radar sensor fixed in the rooms where it is installed, so it says nothing about the driveway at all.
And any wearable helps only if it is on the person when the door closes behind them, not on the kitchen counter.
Once the equipment is in, run a test call with us. It is the one way to know that the button reaches an operator and that the numbers on the response plan are current before anyone has to rely on them.
Then settle who calls whom, and when. A short phone call every morning from the same family member is easier to keep up through a February cold snap than a vague promise to drop by.
A help button does not prevent a fall, and it cannot open a closed highway.
Some of our wearables offer automatic fall detection, which reads movement patterns that look like a fall and raises an alert. It misses some falls. No sensor on the market catches every fall, so pressing the button stays the main way to ask for help.
Silver Shield does not route to a Bedford operator. It alerts the family’s own contacts, following protocols the family sets, and the 24/7 in its description refers to the sensor and its AI rather than to monitoring staff.
Nothing on this page replaces what the care team has arranged, and none of it is medical advice.
Bedford Medical Alert is Canadian owned and operated, monitors from Canada, holds a 4.9-star Google rating, is an OCSA member and brings three generations of experience. Equipment is included with the subscription. Plans typically run month to month after a three-month minimum at the start, with optional six or twelve month initial terms if the savings suit you. Service reverts to month to month afterwards, and there are no cancellation fees.
Bedford services are funded or approved under a range of provincial, federal and community programs for those who qualify, and Bedford is as likely to be funded as any other provider. We cannot take on application paperwork; referrals of that kind usually come to us through a case worker.
For someone whose winter will be spent mostly inside the house, the in-home system is usually the place to begin. Read about Home Freedom Systems, or call 1-888-755-3055 to speak with a Bedford specialist. If a Go Anywhere device fits the household better, we will tell you before anything ships. We cannot answer questions about the hospital, its programs or a discharge date; your care team can.
