Public health experts called for urgent action on Saturday in the wake of a devastating assessment of Ontario’s long-term care sector, saying they hope the province learns and retains key lessons from its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Their reflections came hours after an independent commission released a scathing report on Ontario’s pandemic response in long-term care homes, where the bulk of virus-related deaths took place during the pandemic’s first wave.
The blistering, 322-page document called for an overhaul of the sector, saying the province was ill-prepared to face COVID-19 despite lessons it should have learned from the SARS epidemic.
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Nearly 4,000 long-term care residents and 11 staff have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic hit.
Dr. Naheed Dosani, a palliative care physician and health justice activist in Toronto, said those numbers don’t reflect “the immense distress and grief” many caregivers and families across the province are feeling.
“This report does give some insight into how we got here, (but) it does not represent justice to the full extent. And for many caregivers, it will not be,” Dosani said.
“No one will ever forget what happened. These are scars that will last forever.”
Friday night’s report to the Ontario government said the province’s long-term care sector needs sweeping reforms to protect its vulnerable residents.
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The commission, led by Ontario Superior Court Associate Chief Justice Frank Marrocco, noted that poor facility design and resident overcrowding heightened sickness and death in nursing homes, while a severe staffing shortage and a workforce poorly trained in infection control measures compounded the situation.
The commission found the neglected sector to be thoroughly unprepared for the COVID-19 crisis, despite numerous past reviews.
Donna Duncan, the CEO of the Ontario Long Term Care Association, said the province can’t “honour the memory of the people who’ve died” without making some of the changes suggested in the report.
“We have a duty to those who lost their lives in this to make sure we don’t accept anything less than moving forward with change — building out the infrastructure, building the workforce and building the partnership in a way that allows us to reimagine what long-term care is and how we serve our aging population,” Duncan said in an interview.
Dosani said the government failed to learn lessons during the pandemic’s initial wave, which wreaked havoc on long-term care, leaving seniors vulnerable when cases surged again.
Even after the commission was launched — and after it released two interim sets of recommendations — the virus continued to tear through the facilities.
“I’ll never understand how we were able to produce so many reports on how to fix long-term care and still to this day, we have not fixed it,” he said. “How many reports do we need? … If it’s not connected to action and change, what’s the point?”
Dosani paused to fight back tears while describing reading through the document Friday night.
He said he felt for the families of those who died in long-term care during the pandemic, and for those working in the sector who had little support for the trauma they experienced there.
“Staff were crying before, during and after work, vomiting in locker-rooms from stress and watching residents they love dying in great numbers,” he said, summarizing some findings outlined in the report. “There’s so much emotion and so much pain involved in this whole ordeal.
“It’s sad that so much of this seems like it was preventable. And that for me is the worst part of it all.”
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Duncan said mental health supports will be needed going forward.
“Our staff has been traumatized, as have our residents and their families,” she said. “We need to be validating and recognizing what our homes have been through.”
Merrilee Fullerton, Ontario’s minister of long-term care, issued a statement late Friday night promising to work towards a “safe and modern” update to the sector.
She thanked the commissioners for their efforts and pledged a thorough review of their findings.
She said many of the improvements called for in their report align with steps the government has already taken, asserting the situation in the province’s long-term care facilities has improved in recent months.
Nonetheless, she said, the harm to the province’s seniors is clear.
“There’s no question that residents and staff at long-term care homes and their families were disproportionally impacted by COVID-19,” Fullerton said in the statement. “… We cannot let their experience be in vain — and we won’t.
“We will continue to work with our partners across the sector to address the commission’s recommendations as we continue to build a safe and modern long-term care sector that respects the dignity of our seniors and the staff that care for them.”
Duncan said steps are underway to improve Ontario’s long-term care sector, including building new facilities.
Duncan added that prioritizing initial shipments of COVID-19 vaccines within long-term care facilities also vastly limited the damage during the pandemic’s third wave.
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“We’ve really stabilized our homes and that gives me real hope,” she said.
Meanwhile, Ontario reported 3,369 new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday and 29 more deaths linked to the virus.
Health Minister Christine Elliott said there are 1,050 new cases in Toronto, 819 in Peel Region, 286 in York Region, 158 in Ottawa and 157 in Durham Region.
Figures showed 2,152 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Saturday morning, with 900 in intensive care and 637 on a ventilator.
The number of patients in ICUs represents a pandemic high, according to the Ontario Hospital Association.
Ontario said 107,700 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine were administered since Friday’s report for a total of 5,247,684 shots given in the province.