RNAO CEO and President Available to Media After Today's Speech From the Throne
Representatives of the
RNAO has been vocal in its advocacy for A Just Recovery for All. The association sent a letter to Prime Minister
Members of the media interested in arranging interviews should contact RNAO's communications department below.
* * *
To: The Rt. Hon.
Dear Prime Minister Trudeau,
In light of the government's decision to prorogue parliament, I am writing to you in lieu of our planned submission to the
It has been said many times, in many places, and in many ways that COVID-19 has had a profoundly inequitable impact on Canadians. It is clear, nearly seven months into this pandemic, that COVID has preyed on the most vulnerable Canadians, and in doing so, has exposed our collective failure to build a country that provides health, safety and security to all.
This is not a failing of a single government or even a single order of government. And most certainly, a plan to "build back better" will need to involve all orders of government and the many of us who are eager and able to assist. A plan with ambition for this country, as is required at this moment, requires bold leadership. That, RNAO believes, falls first-and-foremost to you. We are, therefore, urging that your government's plan address two issues that through this pandemic have been exposed as critical to the health and well-being of Canadians: long-term care and housing.
Long-term care (LTC)
In your remarks announcing an upcoming speech from the throne, you made reference to "the shortfalls in health care that meant soldiers were caring for seniors." The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) report/1 on the
While the CAF was assigned to provincially prioritized homes, COVID-19 revealed systemic issues across
Many of these deaths were preventable. In
Also in June, RNAO submitted the "Nursing Home Basic Care Guarantee" /6 to
Prime Minister Trudeau, we urge you and your team to consider the following basic care guarantee as a national standard in response to this workforce crisis:
1. Ensure each long-term care (LTC) home provides a minimum of four (4) worked hours of nursing and personal care to each resident per day, according to the following staff mix formula: 20 per cent registered nurses (RN), 25 per cent licensed practical nurses (LPN) (called registered practical nurses (RPN) in
a) a minimum of 0.8 worked hours (48 minutes) of RN direct care per resident, per day
b) a minimum of 1.0 worked hour (60 minutes) of RPN/LPN direct care per resident, per day
c) a minimum of 2.2 worked hours (132 minutes) of PSW direct care per resident, per day
2. Ensure each LTC home employs a full-time equivalent (FTE) NP per 120 residents, in the role of attending nurse practitioner (NP)./12 In regions where there is a shortage of NPs, employ a clinical nurse specialist (CNS).
3. Ensure each LTC home employs an FTE nursing staff member (preferably an RN) to support the functions of infection prevention and control, quality improvement, staff education, onboarding and orientation.
4. Ensure each LTC home implements the following mandated standards:
a) Disallow LTC staff (RN, RPN/LPN, PSW) from working in other LTC homes.
b) Ensure nursing and personal care salaries in LTC are commensurate with those paid to the same health workers in other sectors, such as hospitals.
c) Ensure full-time employment with benefits is offered to staff interested in full-time work, to enable continuity of care for residents, improve staff retention and remove the need to work in multiple locations.
5. Ensure each LTC home includes an appropriate complement of interprofessional staff, including: physiotherapy, rehabilitation therapy, speech therapy, social work, dietary and dental care.
HOUSING
Housing is a determinant of health. In the best of times, people experiencing homelessness are more vulnerable to illness and disease than the housed. Estimates suggest that many years of living without housing leads to age-related ailments typical of housed individuals 20 years older. But these are the worst of times, where vulnerability is targeted by a deadly, sweeping virus.
Public health advice during this pandemic has reinforced the importance of housing as a defence against COVID-19. "Stay home, self-isolate, wash hands frequently," has been the constant refrain for months. Yet each year, nearly 250,000 Canadians experience homelessness - 35,000 on any given night. Another 1.7 million Canadians have core housing needs and, under the severe economic strain of this pandemic, are vulnerable to joining the numbers of homeless - or have already.
There is nothing inevitable about homelessness in a country as wealthy as ours. In such a country, allowing persons to experience homelessness should be seen as societal decay and government abandonment. Homelessness is the product of decades of public policy choices by all orders of government. We implore you to make different choices.
RNAO is joining thousands of Canadians and dozens of organizations - including the
* Expanded federal investment in community-based homelessness responses.
* A national, guaranteed minimum income that will ensure those in greatest need have the necessary financial resources to meet their basic needs and prevent homelessness when times are tough.
* The construction of 300,000 new, permanently affordable and supportive housing units for enhanced rental support for low-income Canadians.
* Meaningful implementation of the right to housing, including the appointment of a national housing advocate and national housing council.
* Curtailment of the impacts of financialization of rental housing markets.
* Support and adequate resources for the development and implementation of an urban and rural Indigenous housing and homelessness strategy by urban, rural and northern Indigenous peoples and housing and service providers.
CAEH's Recovery For All plan has the complementary benefit of spurring
CONCLUSION
This pandemic has taught us lessons in the cruelest way - with the loss of life. It is, therefore, imperative that we take these lessons to heart and act on them. We owe it to those who lost their lives to COVID-19, as well as those who remain most vulnerable to this disease - the elderly and the homeless.
A lesson that we hope has not escaped our government is the value of nurses and nursing to our health system. We have been at the frontlines of this pandemic since COVID-19 struck our country, doing heroic work with the resources available to care for all Canadians. But without question, a greater and more strategic deployment of nurses in our health system would have enabled
In RNAO's recently released policy document, Enhanced Community Care for Ontarians 3.0,/13 we argue for an accessible, equitable, person-centred, integrated and publicly funded health system that can only be realized when we have a fully integrated provincial health system anchored in primary care with enhanced community care capacity. Such a system depends on having RNs and NPs working upstream in public health, having RNs, NPs and RPNs/LPNs providing primary care to a much larger extent, having RNs, NPs, CNSs and RPNs/LPNs providing care in the home, having nurses providing minimum hours of direct care in nursing homes, and having all nurses practising to full scope. In short, nurses are central to achieving universal health care and advancing a healthier
As a final recommendation to you - and as a reminder of our original ask during
Prime Minister Trudeau, we thank you for this opportunity to share our thoughts and concerns, born of much experience, research, hard work and, of late, grief. We wish you courage to make the changes necessary to ensure our most vulnerable are put first among us. If there is anything worthy at all that can come of the lives lost to COVID-19 and the grief it has caused, that would be it.
Yours warmly,
CC: The Hon.
The Hon.
The Hon.
Adam Vaughan, MP (Parliamentary Secretary, Housing)
Jagmeet Singh, MP and Leader of the Federal NDP
Elizabeth May, MP and Leader of the
Footnotes:
1/ Mialkowski, C.J.J. (2020). OP Laser -- JTFC Observations in Long--Term Care Facilities in
2/ LTC deaths and total deaths for the ratio are taken from
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