Study calls for $1.8B in LTC funding,
COVID-19 complications show need for more daily hands-on care in Ontario
Ontario nursing homes need an extra $1.8 billion a year to hire more staff and improve care of vulnerable residents in the wake of COVID-19 horrors, says the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
The increase of 41 per cent would allow the 626 long-termcare homes to provide at least four hours of hands-on care daily for their 80,000 vulnerable residents, a new study from the think tank recommends.
The study was released Tuesday as Premier Doug Ford prepares to launch a promised “independent commission” in July into the pandemic’s impact on nursing homes, where the killer virus spread easily.
“The most potent factor shaping quality of care and safety of both residents and staff working in long-term-care facilities is staffing levels,” the centre’s senior economist, Sheila Block, said in the 12-page study called “What Does It Cost to Care?”
COVID-19 infected almost 5,400 nursing-home residents and killed 1,803. Another 2,205 staff members caught the virus, and seven of them also died.
The study by the left-leaning think tank also called for wage increases to bring non-unionized nurses, personal support workers and other staff up to levels of unionized staff, which would cost $285 million out of the $1.8 billion. “The premier has heaped praise on front-line health-care workers for their work during the pandemic, and rightly so,” says the study.
“Now is the time to go beyond words and support them in a very real way, and that means better jobs and more co-workers.”
The Ontario Long-Term Care Association has said Ford’s pandemic pay boost of $4 an hour was not enough to entice many long-term-care workers to stay on the job when they feared for their health, and is calling for a provincial strategy to help replace thousands of workers who have fled the sector, along with better supplies of personal protective equipment and an “army” of infection control staff to prepare for a second wave.
Block estimated long-termcare residents are getting about 2.7 hours a day of care from registered nurses, registered practical nurses, personal support workers and others, ranging from dispensing medications by nurses to toileting, grooming and dressing. New Democrats and Green Leader Mike Schreiner have been calling for a minimum standard of four hours a day. Long-Term Care Minister Merrilee Fullerton said it will take time to fix problems in long-term care, which include a waiting list of 35,000 people the government is trying to ease by building thousands new beds, and staff shortages that predated the pandemic.
“Years of neglect cannot be turned around in a matter of days,” she told MPPs in the legislature Tuesday. “Nobody was prepared for the aggressive, infectious nature of COVID-19.”
The high toll the virus took on nursing-home workers left some facilities desperately short of staff, with the hardesthit down as low as 20 per cent and prompting Ford to call in medical teams from the Canadian Armed Forces.
Hospitals sent “SWAT teams” of doctors, nurses, infection control, cleaning and other staff into dozens of long-term-care homes, with several becoming the subject of provincial takeover orders and under day-today management of local hospitals to stabilize care levels.
A military report on five homes, including Orchard Villa in Pickering, found problems including the dispensing of long-expired medications, residents malnourished or fed forcefully to the point of choking and left unturned in beds for long periods, developing painful skin ulcers, with cries for help ignored for hours at a time, along with being left in soiled diapers.