Ford missed window to fix long-term care

September 29, 2020

QUEEN’S PARK — Mike Schreiner released the following statement about the Premier’s late gasp to shore up long-term care:

“For months, the Ford government sat on reports calling for urgent action to shore up the situation in long-term care.

Now at the eleventh hour, Ford is pleading with health workers on social media to come forward and fix the mess that he ignored.

In July, the Ministry’s own staffing study explicitly told the government to hire more nurses and frontline workers to lift standards of care to safe levels.

Studies from the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives pegged the costs of safe staffing levels at $1.6-1.8 billion.

These reports laid out a roadmap for fixing long-term care, but the Premier left them to gather dust, refusing to allocate the $1.6 billion needed to prevent a tragedy.

It’s totally unacceptable that the Premier wasted a precious window of time and only now is scrambling to shore up the crisis in long-term care.”

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