Ontario is suffering from a crisis in long term care. To be more precise, the province is still suffering from a chronic shortage of long term care facilities as evident by recent reports that nearly 300 people have been moved from hospitals to long-term care homes not of their choosing during the past 12 months.
According to the Ontario Long Term Care Home Association, one in five seniors over the age of 80 have complex care needs that require long-term care. Despite the fact that there are more than 76,000 long term care beds in the province, some 43,000 seniors were on waiting lists for long term care as of Jan. 1, 2024. The number has nearly doubled over the past 10 years and it is expected to grow by 1,000 people per year for the next several years.
The extensive waiting list means that the average senior requiring long term care will wait 126 days to access a bed, with some waiting up to 2.5 years. Many seniors will die before ever getting the long term care they need.
The biggest reason the waiting list is outpacing the creation of nearly 1,000 long term care beds a year is the fact that Ontario’s population is continuing to age at a dizzying rate. The number of people over the age of 80 grew from 663,730 in 2011 to 517,910 in 2021. That’s an increase of 14,582 per year every year for 10 straight years.
The other problem long term care is facing in Ontario is the labour shortage in the health care sector. You can build all the long term care facilities and create all the long term care beds you want, but if you can’t staff them it’s a waste of time. By 2029, Ontario long term care homes will require at least 58,600 more nurses and personal support workers to support residents in new long-term care spaces. That is more than double the current nursing and personal support workforce.
Because of the disparity between long term care beds in Ontario and the number of seniors with high care needs, many seniors end up being “housed” in local hospitals. In 2022, an estimated 2,400 seniors requiring long term care were being kept in hospitals. That number got as low as 1,300 last year. Although the current number is not available, it must be relatively high to feel the need to relocate 300 of them to long term care facilities not of their choosing and often 50-75 kms away.
The inability of the long term care sector to keep pace with the number of seniors needing institutional long term care, means the responsibility to care for those folks will fall on their families who won’t have the ability or capacity to do so.
To say long term care in Ontario is in dire straits with a bleak future is a gross understatement. More needs to be done. A strategy needs to be developed, funds allocated, and a government put in place that is willing to carry it out for the good of everyone.