Katrina Peterson is a Unifor member, who works in long-term care. She's helping to lead a rally in Dryden that's part of a province-wide lobbying effort to get the Queen's Park to improve conditions in facilities, as we enter the second wave of the pandemic.
"Their PR work is great. They've been out in the news throwing all this money out there. It looks good, but it really isn't the dollar amount we need to fix long-term care. It's just a quick-fix. It isn't going to fix long-term care permanently," Peterson emphasized.
Union members say they spend five or six minutes with residents in the morning, but they would like to be able to spend more like four hours a day with residents.
"With the first wave, it looked like maybe they could see what was happening in long-term care, but we don't see any push again for ending for-profit organizations," she said this morning.
During the first wave, 81 per cent of COVID-19 deaths were linked to long-term care homes.
According to the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the analysis included:
- all 623 Ontario LTC homes
- comprising 75,676 residents
- 360 LTC homes (57.7%) were for profit
- 162 (26.0%) were nonprofit
- 101 (16.2%) were municipal homes
- 190 (30.5%) outbreaks of COVID-19 in LTC homes
- involving 5,218 residents
- resulting in 1,452 deaths
- with an overall case fatality rate of 27.8%.
