Home care: from adequate funding to integration of services

With the aging of the population, the healthcare system needs to shift from the actual hospital-centred system developed in the past century for dealing with acute diseases and a young population toward a home-centred system, more appropriate for serving older people with chronic diseases. Funding of home care should not only be significantly increased but also be managed differently. We propose the introduction of an autonomy support benefit (ASB) to cover costs related to disabilities, irrespective of living environment, and to set up a public universal autonomy insurance program that will cover the ASB. This insurance should be at least partly capitalized to provide for the aging of the population and to ensure intergenerational equity. Also, since the home is a much more complicated service-delivery environment than the hospital, these services must be coordinated and integrated. The Program of Research to Integrate the Services for the Maintenance of Autonomy (PRISMA) is a coordination-type model of integration that was implemented and evaluated in three areas (one urban and two rural) in and around Sherbrooke, Quebec. A four-year longitudinal quasi-experimental study with over 1,500 participants demonstrated its efficiency in improving system effectiveness at no extra cost.