UPDATE: Group home cuts

We continue to receive extremely disturbing reports from families, staff, agencies and other community advocacy groups about what's being described as a "vicious" and "clandestine" cost-cutting push to close group homes and relocate current residents to less costly, informal living arrangements.

Three particularly disturbing aspects have emerged: 1) There appears to be great urgency on CLBC's part to accomplish as many moves and closures as possible over the summer months before families and the public even realize what's going on; 2) CLBC is ordering service reductions with far-reaching implications based on a draft policy that has not even been  formally approved or announced, raising questions about potential legal challenges; and 3) MCFD has a similar cost-cutting process underway to close children's group homes and relocate youths with very complex needs to foster care.

See a report revealing the children's closures from the Victoria Times Colonist : Ministry closing children in care homes

In the past week MOMS has met or talked with representatives of all stakeholder groups, including CLBC staff. Key points include the following:

Background: CLBC has been working for many years on developing a new process to objectively evaluate individual support needs to ensure that available funding is fairly allocated. While few would object to fair and objective allocation of resources, the Guide to Support Allocation (GSA) and Catalogue of Services intitiatives (both policies, the GSA assessment tool and the catalogue are all still in draft form) appear to have been hijacked and are being prematurely utilized to enforce some $22 million in budget cuts for the current fiscal year, despite growing costs and demands.

Process: CLBC's "service quality analysts" with no training in diagnostic assessment or social work (they require at most a business-related diploma) administer the GSA assessment by visiting the group home or agency and conducting a brief interview with staff (one participant said an interview took approx 10 minutes). The analyst tallies the assessment score and then informs the agency in a follow-up interview that funding for the client has been reduced. The agency is then forced to move the individual to a cheaper residential option like home sharing.

Family members are not being informed or involved in this assessment process. Residents who have no family or friends to advocate on their behalf are not provided with independent advice or advocacy support.

As group homes are closed, union contracts result in a chain of "bumping" based on staff seniority, breaking up many long-standing relationships and disrupting many more homes. In some cases, laid-off employees are rehired as home-share contractors and simply take their clients to live at home with them.

Where group home placements are maintained, funding cuts are eroding quality of care and quality of life.

Oversight: Home sharing is not subject to the strict licencing, standards and independent inspections required of professionally-staffed group homes. CLBC's policies delegate esponsibility for oversight and monitoring of home share settings to the same community agencies that run them (i.e. self- policing).  Strict confidentiality rules mean that agency staff and providers are not allowed to publicly disclose concerns.

Issues raised:

• Who authorized the use of the DRAFT GSA and Servicce Catalogue policies and processes, which have yet to be finalized, approved or announced, to effectively reduce individual support allocations with far-reaching consequences?
  • CLBC has a policy on how it develops and implements new policies and these actions appear to conflict with that. Read CLBC's Policy Development and Implementation Policy
  • Neither the GSA or the Catalogue of Services have yet been published in CLBC's list of policies, leaving residents, families and the public in the dark about the parameters for the far-reaching process underway. Read CLBC's list of policies
• CLBC analysts and the group home staff they interview to complete the GSA both lack the required training to undertake a formal diagnostic assessment of individuals with very complex special needs, particularly one with far-reaching consequences and no established system of checks and balances or appeal process.
• The utilization of the draft GSA tool is resulting in decisions that conflict with very specific commitments that both CLBC and the Minister responsible have made:
  • Provincial authorities have repeatedly stressed that a pivotal principle in establishing CLBC and reforming service delivery was to offer more choices: the forced relocation of group home residents based on a GSA assessment, and denial of group home placements as an option for incoming adults, both conflict fundamentally with the principle of choice.
  • CLBC and the Minister have repeatedly promised that families would be fully engaged in all decisions: The public and families have been kept in the dark about the implementation of a re-assessment process that several participants have described as clandestine, vicious and extremely rushed; family members not been informed or invited to participate in individual assessments.
  • Minister Coleman committed that no one would be moved from a group home against their will: the GSA assessments have already resulted in forced relocations and these continue to occur at a rapid pace. The Minister has declined to respond or intervene, except in the Powell River case, despite repeated complaints from families, community groups and others.