City working to enhance long-term care homes

The City of Ottawa can and will do more to improve the long-termcare homes under its purview, but there’s also a gap the province can fill to help the embattled system, says the city manager responsible for long-term care.

Following a string of incidents, including the repeated punching of one resident by a personal support worker, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care issued a blanket order earlier this week to improve safety and care at three of the four city-run long-term-care homes in Ottawa.

On Friday, Janice Burelle, the city’s general manager of community and social services, said the city is taking the province’s “director referral order” very seriously.

Those areas of concern primarily focus on staff training and supervision to ensure incidents of abuse or neglect don’t occur at city-run homes. The Citizen revealed on Wednesday that, since 2012, there have been at least 19 instances of patient abuse — either sexual, physical or verbal — that have led to non-compliance orders being issued by the health ministry against city-run facilities.

However, a stronger focus on training isn’t a substitute for a lack of staff, critics of long-term care in Ontario contend.

And that’s where the province could play a role, said Burelle.

“Certainly more hours of care (per patient) would be extremely useful in terms of alleviating some of the pressures personal support workers (and facilities face),” she said. “More funding for more time with residents would be very, very welcomed.”

Burelle said with the attention being paid to long-term care “from a variety of situations and incidents” and with a recognition that the population is aging, the province may want to “take a step back and look at funding and other solutions so that we can provide the adequate care that is expected.

“Is the province willing to consider more funding? It’s certainly something we can put on the table.”

A lack of funding is a contributing factor that needs to be addressed to help fix a “broken” system, Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said Friday in a statement to the Citizen.

“We need to know how issues like underfunding, understaffing, and the lack of any minimum standards of care are impacting quality of care so that we can take the necessary steps to fix our broken system,” she said.

Minimum standards of care are also an issue at city-run facilities in Ottawa. While there is no legislated mandate for the number of hours of care per resident daily — something critics have long called for — the ideal hours of daily care per resident is four, according to a 2008 independent review of longterm care homes commissioned by the province.

At city-run facilities, direct hours of care are currently 2.54 hours per resident daily, Burelle said.