Proposed new post-pandemic standards for long-term care being released today

As hundreds of long-term care homes across the country grapple with new outbreaks of COVID-19, highly-anticipated draft national standards for these facilities are being released today.

The pandemic exposed fatal weaknesses in Canada's long-term care sector. In the first few months of the pandemic, more than 80 per cent of Canada's known COVID-19 deaths happened in long-term care and retirement homes — the highest such rate among nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

"I'm hoping. My God, I'm hoping that this will be a clear blueprint that really can enable provincial and territorial and federal action to move long-term care to where all Canadians are demanding it to go," said Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Sinai Health and the University Health Network in Toronto.

Sinha chaired the Health Standards Organization technical committee that drafted the proposed standards. The HSO is an independent, not-for-profit organization that develops standards and assessment programs for the health and social services sectors.

The federal government launched the project to draft new national standards last spring. Today's report from the HSO revises standards affecting the quality of direct care — but not standards related to infection control.

Infection control standards are being rewritten by the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), which is also looking at ventilation, plumbing and medical gas systems in long-term care facilities. The CSA's draft standards are expected sometime in February.

The HSO's proposed national standards go well beyond the current ones, which were last updated in 2020. The draft regulations focus on resident-centred care and run to eight new sections, 17 new clauses and 148 new criteria.

"We didn't want to leave anything out. We want to really outline everything that we think needs to be properly assessed … properly coordinated," said Dr. Sinha.

The draft standards are intended to give long-term care residents more control over their lives by giving them a greater say in daily care decisions and visitor policies. They would direct long-term homes to plan meaningful daily activities and facilitate social connections between residents, both inside and outside of facilities.

The HSO document includes a section on defining and protecting the right of residents to "live at risk" — to, for example, balance facilities' need to protect their residents with the right of individual residents to receive visitors.

While the document doesn't state clearly where that balance should be struck, it's clearly intended to address the isolation and loneliness suffered by many long-term care residents who were cut off from in-person visits early in the pandemic.

"I was actually very disheartened to see that we did not get the balance right between keeping residents safe from a virus and separating them from their families. The outcome, in many cases, was detrimental to residents," said B.C.'s former health minister Terry Lake, now CEO of the B.C. Care Providers Association. Lake had not yet seen the draft standards when he spoke to CBC News.

Susan Mills' mother Barbara, who is 86 and has dementia, is a resident at The Grove Nursing Home in Arnprior, Ont. Mills said the forced isolation her mother experienced for almost seven months in 2020 — when she could only see her family through a window — accelerated her decline.

"I feel guilty (she was there) but … I didn't really have a choice," said Mills.