COVID-19 Update for December 2 2020 – 2:30PM

Ford announces $115M investment in virtual care and community care services

Today, Premier Doug Ford announced an investment of $115M to help 815 hospital patients with high complex care needs transition to home or community care. These patients will be able to have all their healthcare needs addressed at home, including up to eleven hours per day of healthcare services. Province-wide, this would equate to 484,000 nursing visits and approximately 1.4 million hours of care from personal support workers.

This investment includes $14.5M to expand virtual care for Ontario health teams as well as for frontline home and community care providers. Ontario has seen an increase in virtual care being delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic and this investment will allow the government to sustain these new levels of virtual care capacity. Specifically, this investment will be allocated to purchasing new technology for video conferencing, remote monitoring and secure messaging to allow the delivery of care at home to continue.

You can read the full announcement here.