Advocates looking for national standards for long-term care

By Dale Woodard on March 31, 2021.

Seniors using walkers make their way back to a waiting vehicle following a seniors home group picnic in 2019 at Henderson Lake. Herald file photo

Advocates representing more than a million Canadians – including the Lethbridge Chapter of Friends of Medicare – have banded together to demand that the federal government and provinces work together to establish national standards for long-term residential care.
Last week, groups released a legal opinion setting out a proposal for a commitment from the federal government to ongoing funding for long-term care with clear criteria requiring the provinces to improve quality, accountability and take profit out of seniors’ care.
It’s a situation further driven by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“This has been in the making for a while because provinces right across Canada have been having trouble with people dying in long-term care of COVID,” said Bev Muendel-Atherstone, Chair of the Lethbridge Chapter of Friends of Medicare. “The number of COVID deaths are staggering in long term care and most of the people dying were in long-term care. So the percentages are way up there, 65 to 70 per cent of people who were dying were in long-term care.
“Each of the provinces was dealing with this individually, but they felt if they came together, the various health groups the various provinces, they could make a petition to the federal government to actually work on this together because this is national problem, it’s not just provincial, where our elders who have worked so hard their entire lives helping to build Canada are left in these private-for-profit long-term care facilities and were left to die with less an inappropriate circumstances where there weren’t enough people caring for them and certainly proctocols do not seem to be followed to the same degree as other places in Canada.”
The long-term care program would embrace the five principles of the Canada Health Act under a new Long-Term Residential Care act; public administration, comprehensiveness, universality, accessibility and portability.
That would also include three new criteria; quality, accountability and public/non profit care.
Long term care is not included within the Canada Health Act, said Muendel-Atherstone.
“There’s something wrong when our seniors, our most vulnerable people, are not included within the Canada Health Act. So in order to put some teeth into it, we can’t change the constitution, but we can put other things in place to ensure quality of care.”
Quality is a big issue, said Muendel-Atherstone, adding it’s difficult to ensure quality care when each province’s standards are different and the criteria for people working in long-term care are different.
“They even have different names, whether they’re called LPNs or care assistants, they’ve got different titles and different training,” she said. “So in order to ensure quality we have to have something where everyone gets a certain level of training and it would really help if they all had the same titles. It would also help if they were receiving appropriate renumeration for their training and their skills.”
Muendel-Atherstone said accountability lies in checking on long-term care homes with out a heads-up.
“What we’ve found under COVID in province after province, the long term care facilities – especially the for-profit ones – were being told ahead of time before someone came to check on the facility,” she said. “These weren’t spontaneous and in order to really know what’s happening any place you need to go where people are not told ahead of time that someone is going to come and check on what’s actually happening to the people in care.”
Muendel-Atherstone added when the different provinces looked at where people were dying, the number of people caring for the seniors in long-term care were reduced, relating to a profit motive.
“So having fewer numbers of care givers for the people being cared for related to the profit motive,” she said. “If we have nation-wide standards of the number of caregivers per clients and the care givers have a certain level of knowledge and these facilities are being checked upon on a regular basis, but unbeknowst to the homes, there has to be some kind of clear, consistent guidlines on what happens if the home is not providing the services up to the quality that is needed. So whether it’s fines or shutting down the home or prison sentences, whatever it is, it needs to be very clear, followed through and consistent right across all the provinces. Who can do that consistency best? It has to be a national standard.”
On March 23 the NDP presented a motion in parliament for there to be national long-term care standards, which was defeated, said Muendel-Atherstone, adding Deb Schulte, who has been the minister of seniors since November of 2019 under the Trudeau government, said they will work with the provinces to work on the standards, but there was no commitment to work on national standards.
When the federal budget comes out April 19, Muendel-Atherstone said it remains to be seen if something will be in the federal budget to put some money into public and not-for-profit long term care.
She said if an election is called it appears all parties will be bringing this up as an election issue.
“It looks like Canadians are getting tired of the empty rhetoric and empty promises when people are dying and are tired of just condolences without some changes being enacted, especially when most of these were preventable deaths.”

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