While change won’t happen overnight we need to start somewhere and there is no better time than now. The upcoming provincial elections provide an excellent opportunity to demand change. If we don’t demand change now in Ontario’s long-term care home system, the status quo is likely to be with us for decades to come.
Here are some questions to consider asking the candidates who are running for office in your riding:
Small homelike environments and COVID
Ontario’s Long-term Care COVID-19 Commission recommended that the Ontario government promote and provide funding for long-term care homes that change to recognized, emotion-based models of care – where residents, staff and families live in smaller, home-like environments which have shown fewer COVID cases and fewer deaths than in the current institutional models.
Do you agree with this and if so, would you commit to start this process in the first year of your term?
Emotion-based model of care and funding
Ontario’s Long-term Care COVID-19 Commission recommended that the government promote and provide funding for long-term care homes that change to recognized, emotion-based models of care where staff know the residents, the residents are engaged and feel they are home and where compassion and respect are at the centre of everything.
Do you agree with this and if so, would you commit to including this in the budget process during the first year of your term?
New Beds
Ontario’s Long-term Care COVID-19 Commission recommended creating smaller self-contained home-like units within existing and new homes.
As Ontario looks at developing and rebuilding LTC homes in the future, do you agree with this and if so, what incentives would you put in place to make this happen during the first year of your term?
This needs to happen now.
Thanks for your comment. We couldn’t agree more.
We need to change long-term care. A good start would be to get rid of for-profit warehouses. We also need more and better at home care. No one wants to spend their senior years in a LTC Home.
Thanks for your comments. The situation is a complicated one. We have found success stories in both the for-profit and public long-term care homes where an emotion-based model of care was implemented. We hope that more homes will adopt an emotion-based approach to care as recommended by the Ontario Government’s Independent Long-term Care Covid-19 Commission. We need improvements in both the home care and long-term care homes sectors.