Pilot program to help hospital patients transfer back home launches in Yorkton

Yorkton, Sask. -

In support of helping patients transition from out of the hospital and back into their homes, a new check-in call service program has been launched in Yorkton.

The Friendly Calls+ Hospital to Home program will provide regular follow up calls to people who have been recently discharged from Yorkton Regional Health Centre.

The 12-week pilot project was organized between the Canadian Red Cross and Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA). Throughout its course, the University of Regina (U of R) will also be conducting a voluntary research study of the project.

“We have a really effective Friendly Calls+ program and my goal was to figure out a way to get our Friendly Calls program and expand it to help more people,” said Luc Mullinder, vice-president for Saskatchewan Canadian Red Cross.

“We spent a lot of time talking with the SHA, a lot of time talking with Minister Everett Hindley, talking about how we can use the things that are successful in Saskatchewan and expand them.”

The program aims to provide emotional support, social interaction, enhanced coping skills and connections to community resources to eligible people free of charge. It will be offered to patients over the age of 18, who have been recently discharged from the hospital, who are referred by hospital staff and who could benefit from an additional support system.

"Our Friendly Calls program has characteristics that can help the challenges around discharging patients that hospitals in Saskatchewan currently have," said Mullinder,

“For us this is great because it has the potential to keep people from returning to the hospital when they don’t need to and things like that.”

Depending on the program’s outcome, the project has the potential to take the workload off health care workers, SHA stated.

"Having this program to support our patients once they go home will be huge because our patients may be more confident to go home,” said Jodie Yathon, Director of Primary Health Care at SHA.

“That will be factored into their discharge plan, and then we can also better anticipate what their needs and what the services we need in our network and in our community would be,” she added.

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“From the workload perspective hopefully we’ll see, after the conclusion of the pilot, that maybe the readmission rates are reduced, maybe our length of stay could be reduced. Those are things we don’t quite know yet, but I’m hoping that we get as a result of the pilot.”

Dr. Jeff Keshen, the U of R’s president and vice-chancellor, said the institution’s research study will help evaluate the impact the calls have on participants.

"Intrinsically from what health care professionals conclude, we are there to provide the data based upon the experiences of people who are participating in the program, to say to what extent is this in fact effective,” said Keshen.

“Then in government, when they're making their decisions about where they're putting their resources, here we are as providing the evidence to show the degree to which it is effective."

Mullinder said Red Cross is excited to be able to expand an already existing service of theirs and hopes to see people take advantage of the free program.

“It’s a free program, anytime you have a resource that’s free to the public, it’s actually more about just getting people to understand and find out about it more than anything,” he said.