What is Attendant Care and When Do You Need It?

If you have suffered a serious motor vehicle accident, your jurisdiction may provide no-fault accident benefits to cover certain basic medical costs. In Ontario, these benefits are called Statutory Accident Benefits. In many U.S. jurisdictions, they are called PIP benefits. Where they exist, these benefits are available to you, even if you were at fault in the accident.

One type of benefit that can be very important for accident victims with both catastrophic and temporary injuries is Attendant Care Benefits. Attendant Care Benefits provides financial assistance to help you engage someone to provide you with personal assistance. Your attendant will provide you with help doing things you would have done for yourself but for the accident.

Some tasks your attendant might help you with include feeding, bathing, dressing and grooming. For some people, such as those with serious spinal cord injuries, this type of assistance may be required on a permanent basis. For others, such as those with bone fractures that will eventually heal, attendant care needs may be short term.

Other tasks an attendant might be required to provide are more technically advanced, such as catherization, dressing wounds, assisting with bowel care and administering medications. Again, assistance with these tasks may be permanent or temporary, depending on the level of injury.

You may wonder how an attendant care benefit is determined. In Ontario, there is a pre-determined check list of tasks for which attendant care may be provided. It is called a Form 1. Other jurisdictions likely have their own forms. A Form 1 is completed by a health care professional, most often an occupational therapist. The occupational therapist reviews your medical charts and attends at your home to determine what you can and cannot do for yourself. He or she then calculates how much time each task takes per day. For example, it may take your attendant 15 minutes per day to assist you with dressing. Those minutes are then calculated on a monthly basis to come up with your monthly time needed for attendant care.

In Ontario, attendant care is divided into three categories of tasks, depending on the level of sophistication of the tasks. The categories have different pay rates. For example, the insurance company pays a lower hourly rate for grooming than it does for inserting a catheter.

The monthly benefit is calculated by multiplying the number of minutes per month by the applicable hourly rate. In most jurisdictions, there will be a monthly maximum benefit as well. For Ontario, the maximum monthly attendant care benefit is $3000 per month for non-catastrophic injuries and $6000 per month for catastrophic injuries.

Attendant care benefits an be reassessed periodically as your condition changes.

You may also be interested to know that in Ontario, a family member or friend can provide the attendant care, provided he or she is competent to do so. You do not need to hire an outside agency to provide the care. This is good news because the hourly rates paid by the insurance company are lower than the market rate to hire a private attendant, in most cases.

Ottawa Car Accident lawyer Brenda Hollingsworth represents injured people who have suffered from motor vehicle accidents in Ottawa and Eastern Ontario. For more information, or to schedule a no obligation consultation, contact us at personalinjuryottawa.ca personalinjuryottawa.ca. You can also telephone us at 613-233-4529.