Retirement homes don’t meet needs

Re: Seniors to convalesce in retirement home beds, by Jessica Smith Cross, The Canadian Press, May 3. Sometimes it’s not the bigticket items in a provincial budget that offer insight into the mindset of the government of the day.

This is the case with a seemingly low-cost pilot project that gives vouchers to alternative level of care patients — who are most often seniors — to leave a public hospital and go to a private retirement home.

It’s a demonstration project that’s all about the Ontario Liberals’ plans to continue to downsize hospitals. Ontario has cut more than 18,000 beds in the last two decades, although the population is growing and aging. It’s also about the Liberals’ penchant for under-radar privatization of public services.

If patients still need care and are too sick to go home, why would we send them to places that don’t have the same regulatory oversight as hospitals and long-term homes and aren’t publicly funded to provide nursing or personal care?

Rather, retirement home regulation falls under the Provincial Tenancies Act. Those who live in them are considered tenants renting a residential unit. Those operating these residences are landlords.

We need hospital wards specifically funded and staffed for elderly patients with complex continuing care needs or who are convalescing post surgeries. Hospitals provide that curative care, retirement homes do not.