Premier Doug Ford’s government is falling short of its promises to conduct annual inspections of every long-term care home in Ontario and to boost the ratio of inspectors to homes, according to information obtained by CBC News.
The government announced a plan in October 2021 to double the number of long-term care inspectors, so that the province would have one inspector for every two nursing homes in the province.
There are 624 long-term care facilities in Ontario. However, figures provided to CBC News this week by the Ministry of Long-Term Care show that only 234 inspectors are currently working in the field.
That’s well short of the 312 that would be needed to meet the promised ratio.
Earlier this year, the government declared that it had already hit its target. “Ontario now has the highest inspector-to-home ratio in the country, surpassing our goal of having one inspector for every two homes in the province,” then-minister Paul Calandra said in a February news release.
Meanwhile, new data shows the government is also failing to meet its pledges on what are called “proactive compliance inspections” — a comprehensive inspection that doesn’t just investigate a specific incident.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Ontario now has the highest inspector-to-home ratio in the country, surpassing our goal of having one inspector for every two homes in the province,” then-minister Paul Calandra said in a February news release.
The government had promised “enough inspectors to proactively visit each home every year, while continuing reactive inspections to promptly address complaints and critical incidents.”
Concerned Friends, which has been advocating for the rights of long-term care residents for more than 40 years, describes the number of proactive inspections as very disappointing.
“The complete inspections of all the standards are done relatively infrequently to this date,” said Alice Gaudine, a registered nurse and board member of the group, Living in Kingston.
“We’d like to see major improvements [to the long-term care system] and it’s hard to imagine how this will happen without a lot of increased resources,” said Lorna MacGregor, a social worker who volunteers with Concerned Friends to review the inspection reports.
An investigation by CBC’s Marketplace found the government made that move despite ministry research that showed the proactive inspections were the only way to reliably find weaknesses in infection control practices.
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