Airwaves Winter 2018

Community RT Committee Report
Role 2: Long term oxygen therapy respiratory care.
This includes hospital based programs (transition and initial set up); respiratory home care
companies and CCAC (ongoing care and follow-up).
The current issue: RT services are utilized and valued in the community but are on an ad
hoc basis and/or differ from one provider to another.
Role 3: Chronic respiratory disease management and respiratory care.
This includes respiratory education involving multiple lung diseases (including COPD and
asthma), performing spirometry and other RT related roles within the scope of practice of
RT located in the primary care setting (e.g., FHTs, CHCs, aboriginal health access centres
and NP led clinics) and CCACs.
The current issue: There are several RTs in the community doing this work, for example in
FHTs, but not until November 2013 was there a formal RT role included in the majority of
FHTs’ or related community based health team’s funding package (there were few centers
that were exceptions to this).
In the past couple of years, our committee, along with the support of the RTSO Board,
successfully advocated for our profession to be placed on a compensation level equivalent
to other regulated health care professionals in primary care. This advocacy effort also
allowed us to inform the evaluators, Korn Ferry/Hay Group and organizations such as the
Association of Family Health Teams of Ontario (AFHTO), Association of Ontario Health
Centres (AOHC) and the Nurse Practitioners Association of Ontario (NPAO) about what we
offer to the health care team.
As Ontario’s Patients First Act continues to be implemented in practice, one of the focuses
of this Act is to improve access to home and community care. Although there are many
RRTs who work for CCACs, home care companies or are a part of hospital outreach teams,
care provided is sporadic and not uniform across Local Health Integration Networks
(LHINs). There is also a need for more RRT services taking care of our elderly and providing
support to those who need chronic mechanical ventilation, complex airways care and
long term oxygen therapy. As we did with our Primary Care advocacy, our committee has
developed a home care task force to develop a generic job description for the home care
RRT, highlighting our full scope of practice, to develop a position paper that can be
used by the RTSO for advocacy to various organizations such as the Ministry of Health and
Long Term Care and LHINs.
Page 15 RTSO Airwaves - Winter 2018