Health care officials say too many seniors are staying too long in hospital beds. (CBC)

As hospitals in Ottawa report an alarming increase in the number of patients waiting for long-term care, hospital administrators met on Friday to try to find a solution.

Speaking at a forum hosted by the Ottawa Council on Aging, panelists — including doctors and nurses — said too many seniors stay in hospital too long for non-acute care.

According to the Ottawa Hospital, the problem has increased by 30 per cent in the past five years. The hospital estimates that each day, more than 10 per cent of its 1,000 beds are taken by patients who don't need acute care.

The hospital's vice-president of facilities, Cameron Love, said so-called "bed blockers" are a big problem for hospitals.

"It leads to high occupancy, it leads to pressure, it leads to cancellation of surgeries," he said. "Where we need to focus on a go-forward basis is how we create that capacity in the community so that we can triage and move those patients safely."

Those patients no longer need to be in the hospital, Love said, but still need some kind of long-term care in the community: "Every day what we are working on is of those 150 patients, where can we place them safely and effectively? And that happens every day."

Carol Burrows, a former president of the Ottawa Council on Aging and a senior herself, said most patients simply want to go home. "They hate being in hospital and they deteriorate while they are there," she said. "Hospitals are dangerous places for seniors."

Robert Cushman, CEO of the Champlain Local Health Integration Network, said the problem is that hospitals are not focused on looking after long-term needs of patients.

"We are very good at taking out an appendix, doing a bit of heart surgery," he said. "We are not good at looking after people as they age. To do that, we need to move resources into the community."

Culture shift needed

The forum's panelists suggested one solution is moving seniors from hospital beds back into their homes, where they would receive in-home care.

Kimberly Peterson, a former nurse who now works for Community Care Access Centres, said in-home programs help seniors take their medication, go to the bathroom and get nursing care.

"When we've done that in the past, we found the majority of them stayed home and didn't go onto long-term care. They were able to use the CCAC services instead and stay in their home," she said.

However, Love said the hospital's staff needs to be convinced this is best for aging patients.

"There's no question that some of these patients can be managed effectively and safely at home," he said.

"What we have to do internally now is change some of our processes from the day that they're admitted to assess the patients based on their requirements, whether we can move them home and if they can't be moved home, then we start looking at alternatives."

Love said the hospital needs to work with health-care providers and hospital staff to "shift our culture" to assess whether patients can go home, instead of just moving towards long-term care.