NLHS CEO warns of 'crunch coming’ over next decade for long-term care beds in N.L.

Newfoundland and Labrador needs to create several hundred new long-term care beds over the next decade, warns the head of the province’s health authority.

“We have a crunch coming for long-term care, without a doubt,” Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services CEO Pat Parfrey told CBC News on Monday.

The province has an aging demographic and emergency rooms filled to capacity with longer wait times becoming part of the norm.

Parfrey said there’s a little under 1,400 long-term care beds in the province today, and estimates the need for more than 1,800, sooner than later.

Long-term care facilities are currently at 98 per cent capacity, he said, but work is underway to create more beds.

“There are proposals to be able to increase the number of long-term care beds, not only in St. John's, but also in Happy Valley-Goose Bay and in central and western,” Parfrey said.

Earlier this week CBC News also reported on overcrowding in Newfoundland and Labrador's emergency rooms and hospitals.

Parfrey said overoccupancy in acute care beds means patients might stay in the emergency room longer.

“Our challenge is to try and move people through hospitals faster, which I suppose we call discharged facilitation, identify new acute care beds and then try and have solutions to people who are in hospital for what we call acute level or alternate level of care," he said.

Parfrey said work is also underway to create more acute care beds — including at the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's — and a new clinical assessment unit in the emergency room, which could prevent a hospital admission.

Meanwhile, NDP Leader Jim Dinn said the problem with long-term care beds, as well as the home care support to keep people out of those facilities, has been long discussed but never solved.

“That’s been a long time coming. That’s been in the media, on the agenda for quite a while, and it still hasn’t been addressed,” Dinn told CBC News on Tuesday.

Dinn said there needs to be an effort to attract workers in these facilities as well, with improved pay and working conditions.

He said there’s “no magic bullet” to address the long-term care bed shortage, or to help people age in place, but the issue stems from affordability, where people can afford to eat healthy and stay healthy.