Thread by @DrVivianS

From an ⁦@extendicare⁩ Assist supervisor:
After dedicating his life to nursing, he has lost trust in his employer. “There is no friggin’ way I would ever put [my mother] in a place like that. Never.”
⤵️ thelocal.to/whos-actually-…

...96 of Ontario’s 626 LTC homes have been outsourced, where the owner of the license has contracted a third party to operate the home. As of publication date, there have been 506 COVID-19 deaths in outsourced homes- 34% higher than homes that have not been outsourced.

Outsourcing is most prevalent among for-profit homes, but it happens across the industry: of the outsourced homes, 61 are for-profit, 30 are non-profit, and 5 are municipal.

Non-profit & municipal homes that have outsourced their operations had death rates that were 105% higher (3.68 per 100 beds) than non-profit & municipal homes that did not (1.79 deaths/100 beds).

It’s not enough to ask who owns the home; it’s also a question of who operates it.

Interesting they can’t answer this question....can’t easily blame older design standards now can ya 🤔

“They have this horrific situation where every week I go in, they would have a different group of PSWs,” says James Ha, the son of a #TendercareLTC resident, whose troubles w/ Extendicare started 2 years before the pandemic.

“They have one [staff member] going around feeding 10 people in the hour of the feeding, & so each person gets about 6 minutes. So basically when they go in, they would just shove the spoon into their mouth, and half [..] of it will go on the bib,” Ha alleges.

Despite what she saw, Ha’s mother asked her children not to complain too much, fearing Thanh would face the repercussions.
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THE #1 FEAR OF LTC FAMILIES.
I hear this ALL the time.

On Dec 12, Tendercare experienced its first COVID-19 resident case. W/n a week, cases had climbed to 92 & 7 deaths. This prompted the province to send in an inspector on Dec 16. IPAC practices were found to be so lacking that the home failed to comply with ministry regulations.

Pat Armstrong (love her), a sociologist in the field of long-term care and professor at York University, has studied long-term care in Canada and around the world, and recognizes these issues as appearing time and again.

Armstrong’s research took her to LTC homes run by a variety of for-profit companies across 🇨🇦 that provide outsourced services: she found that in some cases, contracted-out staff were instructed not to speak to the residents...because it was seen as inefficient (🤬🤬🤬🤬)

Extendicare & its subsidiaries have been named in a number of class-action lawsuits since the pandemic began, the latest of which covers all Extendicare facilities & seeks $200 million in damages, alleging the company failed to adequately respond to C19- that it was negligent.

Extendicare Assist’s largest client is Southbridge Care Homes, the owner of Orchard Villa, the Pickering LTC home with the second-highest number of deaths in the province.

Our analysis shows that the Southbridge-Extendicare combination has a COVID-19 fatality rate of 7.68 per 100 beds—a full 108 percent higher than industry average—the deadliest among all outsourcing arrangements in the province.

Watching Southbridge-Extendicare take over Orchard Villa in 2015 meant witnessing an immediate, steady decline in the quality of care provided at the home, say family members of former residents.  

As with the other homes, it began with the food (which gets contracted out often)

Then staffing......
⤵️ ft. Interview by my friend/fellow advocate @creyola 💔

“There’s your problem right there. If you don’t know that my dad’s normally up & talking and lucid, & then you see him comatose in bed & you don’t have any files to read, how do you know to manage his care?” she says.

In case you want to know which homes they manage:
extendicareassist.ca/partner-homes.…