Ontario can no longer neglect its nursing homes

For months, Canadians have been painfully aware this country’s nursing home residents were suffering the most and dying the most from COVID-19.

For months they’ve known emergency measures, such as sending in the army to the worst-hit facilities, was just a stopgap for a heartbreaking crisis that should never have happened.

Now, two new reports have revealed just how bad the situation truly is and how much a very expensive fix is in order.

The first report, from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, is not only disturbing, it’s embarrassing. Canada has done a worse job of protecting elderly long-term-care residents than any other wealthy country.

As of late May, 80 per cent of Canada’s known COVID-19 deaths were residents of nursing or retirement homes. That’s nearly double the average for countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Australia, 28 per cent of all COVID-19 deaths were in long-term-care facilities. In Germany, it was 34 per cent and in Netherlands 15.

Nor is Canada’s terrible record merely a matter of percentages. Nearly 6,000 residents in 971 Canada nursing and retirement facilities had died from COVID-19 as of June 19. With a population more than twice the size of Canada’s, Germany was reporting roughly half the number of actual deaths in its longterm-care facilities.

The stark discrepancy between Canada and so many other advanced nations wasn’t coincidental. The analysis by the Canadian Institute for Health Information concluded the countries that best guarded their nursing home residents were the ones that had made sweeping changes at their facilities as soon as they locked-down their societies. Canada, to its shame, wasn’t one of these places.

The second report, by University of Toronto, Mcmaster University and Public Health Ontario scientists, casts further light on Canada’s dismal performance. It reveals the major reason for the deadly spread of COVID-19 in our long-term-care facilities was because so many residents have to live in wardlike rooms with four people. Literally hundreds of lives could have been saved if the country had phased out those rooms — many of which became deathtraps. Residents in the most tightly-packed homes were twice as likely to catch COVID-19 and die from it as residents in the least crowded facilities. But when the pandemic arrived, one in four nursing home residents lived in a four-bed room.

The Ontario government has only started to correct this glaring oversight. As of this month, it’s not allowing new long-term-care residents into ward rooms where three or four people share a room and bathroom. The government is also boosting its funding to help the homes do this and, in effect, keep beds empty to avoid overcrowding.

But this doesn’t address the situation for all those still in rooms with four people. Since 1999, the province hasn’t allowed new facilities to have more than two people per room. Yet we’re still grappling with the legacy of the many homes that opened before that time and still have those packed wards.

It will cost a lot of money to end the failed ward model. But we must do it, whatever the price tag. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives last week called for $1.8 billion more in provincial funding so the homes can reach safe staffing levels. That’s a whole different issue, but it indicates just how much Ontario must do to do its elderly right.

The “independent commission” Premier Doug Ford will launch next month to tackle these issues has its work cut out for it.