File photo (image credit - CFJC Today)

By Michael Reeve

LTC STANDARDS

New long-term care standards need investment to create improvement: Lake

Jan 31, 2023 | 4:20 PM

KAMLOOPS — The Health Standards Organization has released a long-term care standards report. The organization’s report focuses on the delivery of high-quality long-term care services. More than 20,000 long-term care residents, workers and other stakeholders provided input into the new standards.

The report provides guidance on the delivery of safe, reliable and high-quality long-term care services, enabled by a healthy and competent workforce.

B.C. Care Providers Association CEO Terry Lake was happy to see the announcement made to help improve care facilities across the country.

“What they do is recognize that we need to make large investments both in people and places. And by people, I mean it recognizes that nursing homes are homes, but they are also places where people work and we need a healthy, well-trained workforce to make them run properly, and we need more of them,” said Lake.

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The main topics covered in the report are promoting good governance, upholding resident-centered care, enabling a meaningful quality of life for residents, ensuring high-quality and safe care, fostering a healthy and competent workforce, and promoting a culture of quality improvement and learning across LTC homes.

Lake did note that the Interior of B.C. is ahead of much of the province in terms of building new long-term care facilities.

The new standards are being introduced as voluntary measures.

“That is our concern, obviously, that these standards are well intentioned but if they don’t come with an amount of money to invest in people and in new constructions, then they really aren’t going to make much of an improvement. Now, here in British Columbia we are lucky because of the investments over the past 20 years. We actually have a much newer nursing home stock than in most of the country,” said Lake.