MPP Walker calls on Minister Damerla to correct erroneous statements on nursing home beds News Date

QUEEN’S PARK – Conservative MPP and PC Critic for Long-Term Care Bill Walker says he is disappointed the Associate Minister of Health and Long-Term Care is making erroneous statements to cover up the government’s lack of action in building new nursing home beds.

MPP Walker cited the Liberal Government’s own media announcements to show that none of them in the last four years mentions the addition of new nursing beds in Ontario.

“Despite the Minister’s earlier claim, she did not put 500 beds in Thunder Bay. That news release talks about home care, but not nursing home beds. As for Waterloo-Wellington, they’ve actually seen a decrease in the rate of long-term care beds per senior citizen. And as for Windsor, the Minister is rehashing a 2011 announcement and 2,000 seniors there remain without access to a bed,” MPP Walker said in today’s question period at Queen’s Park.

Moreover, he added, the associate minister’s claim the government added new beds in Whitby-Oshawa was misleading.

“The truth is, that facility was built to replace the one burned down in a fire in 2014, and houses the same (surviving) residents displaced by that fire,” said MPP Walker.

“This government’s long-standing absence of a real plan to add new nursing home beds in Ontario at a time when 25,000 seniors are without access to a bed is indeed causing our sick and elderly to suffer unnecessarily,” he concluded.

Last week, the same Ministry came under fire following the release of the Auditor General’s 2015 annual report. The province’s auditor identified a pattern of poor oversight of nursing homes, namely a backlog of critical incident and complaint inspections, a lack of inspection standards, and an overall absence of targets and monitoring of the ministry’s inspection program, summing it up as the “unnecessary suffering” of Ontario’s 77,600 sick and frail senior citizens.

The report also included a recommendation from home administrators who have called for minimum care levels and improved standards to improve seniors’ care supports, something the Associate Health Minister Dipika Damerla disputed at Queen’s Park last October.

“Senior citizens deserve dignified, safe and quality care,” MPP Walker said. “The fact that the government hasn’t prioritized their needs and chose to do nothing is putting our senior citizens in a dire situation.”

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