This Canadian patient has been in the hospital for 9 years and refuses to leave
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The COVID-19 pandemic was still four years away, and the world would not know Donald Trump as a U.S. president – in his first go-round in the job – for another year yet.
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More than nine years later, Foley is still at the London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) where he was admitted on Feb. 5, 2016.
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The 49-year-old, who lives with severe disabilities that limit his ability to move and care for himself, doesn't leave LHSC's Victoria Hospital.
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Foley gets few visitors to his sixth-floor room and is the first to admit that he doesn't need the level of advanced medical care that Southwestern Ontario's largest hospital provides. He'd rather receive home care by a team of his choosing, a departure from the norm in Ontario's publicly funded system.
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Instead, Foley remains in an inpatient bed after all these years – at the centre of a protracted legal fight that one expert calls a 'three-way standoff' with LHSC and provincial health care bureaucracies over his care needs.
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'He's right in the middle of one of the most complicated policy questions in Ontario's health care system,' said Rosalie Wyonch, associate director of research at the C.D. Howe Institute.
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'There's always someone who doesn't want what the public options are and wants their own choices. . . . This patient is at this ambiguous centre point of who should be responsible for their care and how much autonomy should they have in that choice.'
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Foley, originally from the Ottawa area, has a significant, genetic neurodegenerative condition that limits his mobility. He can't walk and relies on ceiling-track hoists to help him move. He also eats a pureed food diet because he has difficulty swallowing.
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He's been transferred between units at Victoria Hospital since he was first admitted, including the mental health, nephrology and sub-acute medicine departments.
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In an interview with The London Free Press, Foley said he'd been living independently in his London apartment with the assistance of home care workers before his hospital admission in February 2016. But he claims the care he received was deeply inadequate and a contributing factor to his hospitalization.
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