This long-term care home radically changed the way it operates. Residents say it's working

Like so many people contemplating long-term care, Louis Capozzi said he was nervous about what he would find when he started looking at homes.

"I heard so many awful things about, you know, people getting not well taken care of, laying in bed, needing to be changed and people hitting them or whatever. You hear all the worst things," he said.

But Capozzi, who is 70 and has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, said he was pleasantly surprised by what he found at Toronto's Lakeshore Lodge, where he's lived since June.

Lakeshore Lodge is part of a pilot project to improve care in long-term care facilities — the first of the city of Toronto's municipally-run long-term care homes to receive extra funding to make the care more resident-centred. This allows the people living there to have more choices: in what they eat, when they get up in the morning and even on the colour of the hallways.

Capozzi worked for years as a builder, so he's been consulted on construction aspects of the project. He also loved to cook before his ALS diagnosis, so he's helping improve the menu. He and the other residents on the committee nixed the Salisbury steak, for instance.

But the new program, called CareTO, isn't just about improvements to food and decor. Lakeshore Lodge is shifting away from a traditional model of long-term care homes focused on task-based care — where for example, everyone had to be up and fed at the same time for efficiency.

The funding for the program, which started in June, is $16.1 million over five years. The money will translate into 272 new positions at the city's 10 municipally-run long-term care homes, as well as more training for staff and programming to keep residents stimulated and engaged. The province has provided $12 million, with the rest coming from the city.

Each home will have the chance to make the model its own, molding it to residents' needs.

There were 198,220 long-term care beds in Canada in 2021, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. And the number of seniors needing beds is expected to "greatly increase" in the coming decades as Canada's population ages and the baby-boomer generation nears retirement, the Conference Board of Canada notes.

The goal of the new Toronto program is to improve care and quality of life for residents.

CareTO started at just the right time for Sussett Bartley, who has worked at Lakeshore Lodge as a personal support worker for 18 years. The extra strain COVID-19 brought was wearing her down, she said.

"I personally was getting burned out," she said. 

She said she felt like she never had enough time for the residents she was supporting. Now, with more staff thanks to the new funding, she's gone from having 10 residents under her care during a shift to eight.

It makes a big difference, she said. It means she gets to be with them more, chatting and figuring out what they need.