The tool is the product of a multiple provider partnership called “Bridging the Gap,” in which management from long term care, hospitals, EMS, and CCAC’s meet regularly to address pressing health and long term care provision problems and challenges in the region.

The transfer tool was earmarked as one of the highest necessity, after the partners decided that confusion and inefficiency was the end result of multiple providers having different transfer documents containing differing information.

“We’ve limped along for years,” says Linda Labute, Manager of Resident Care of Herron Terrace long term care home, referring to the haphazard transfer documentation system.

The committee’s resultant new transfer document is merely one page long, but, says Labute, adequately supplies all of the required information needed by any partners who might be involved in a transfer.

It avoids duplication, she explains.

In the past, a resident might be sent to the emergency ward and then return to a long term care home along with documentation which might have contained important clinical information. Now the 14 homes in the region will know exactly what the resident was treated for and what protocol to follow.

“It’s called ‘Bridging the Gap,’” says Labute, “and that’s exactly what its doing.”

The committee, which meets monthly, has also served to clarify roles in the health care spectrum.

An example, says Annette Groulx, Heron Terrace Administrator, is that emergency services personnel often failed to distinguish between long term care homes and retirement homes, the latter of which are also partners in the initiative. This conflation no longer happens.

“Bridging the Gap” has also brought together organizations that have traditionally stayed in their own ‘silos,’ says Labute.

“[Bridging the Gap] has engaged groups that often find it very difficult to engage with each other.”

The committee next plans to focus on CPR status for residents and patients, as well as fine-tuning CCAC referrals.