Ontario's new priority rules drying up cultural LTC admissions
CBC
In an Italian long-term care home in Toronto, about three new non-Italian residents are admitted each month due to government changes to priority rules, leaving them confused and isolated in a setting where they do not speak the language.
Villa Colombo's programming is done in Italian, and many of the new residents don't speak Italian or even English, said executive director Lisa Alcia.
But they are being admitted because of how hospital patients, who can be discharged but can't be cared for at home, are now prioritized.
"I feel for these residents," Alcia said.
"They've been in a hospital, now they're forced into an environment where all the residents around them speak Italian, and they don't. If you've got slight dementia, that triggers a whole lot of negative behaviours because you're culturally isolated."
It's a situation playing out in the several dozen cultural long-term care homes across the province, which cater to seniors from Korean, Jewish, francophone and many other communities, according to the association representing non-profit homes.
A law enacted in 2022 and known as Bill 7 has garnered much criticism for allowing people to be placed in a long-term care home not of their choosing, but AdvantAge Ontario CEO Lisa Levin said the law has had other consequences as well.
"The priority has gone to... people coming out of the hospitals and there's a very rigid bureaucracy behind these admissions," she said.
"So the first person on the list could be someone who doesn't have a preference for a cultural home and the second person on the list could be someone who wants to get into a Finnish home, because they're Finnish. The first available space may be in a Finnish home. It will go to the other person who was number one on the list."
Bill 7 is aimed at moving so-called alternate level of care patients — people who can be discharged from hospital but need a long-term care bed and don't yet have one — in order to free up hospital space.
If there are no spaces available in long-term care homes a patient has put on their preferred list, they can instead be transferred to a home up to 70 kilometres away — 150 kilometres if they are in northern Ontario — selected by a placement co-ordinator at the hospital.
Hospitals are required to charge patients $400 a day if they refuse the transfer.
Levin, of AdvantAge Ontario, said it seems like the impact on cultural home admissions was an unintended consequence of Bill 7 and she has had "encouraging" conversations with Minister Stan Cho about how to address it.
Cho, who took over as long-term care minister in a September cabinet shuffle, said that as a Korean Canadian, issues around cultural homes are hugely important to him.
While his party has made a cause célèbre out of its battle with the Speaker, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has periodically waxed poetic about the House of Commons — suggesting that its green upholstery is meant to symbolize the fields of the English countryside where commoners met centuries ago before the signing of the Magna Carta.