A return to freedom, after nearly a year trapped indoors under lockdown

By: Catherine Porter

For all but five weeks between March 2020 and June 2021, care home residents in Toronto were not permitted to leave their buildings for nonmedical reasons, not even a stroll. Many compared themselves to caged animals or prisoners. The lucky ones lived in residences with attached courtyards, where they could at least feel the sun on their faces.

“At this point,” said Dr. Samir Sinha, NIA Director of Health Policy Research, “the risks of loneliness and social isolation are far greater than dying from COVID-19 in these homes.”

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A year in solitary confinement. The story of the man whose pandemic took away his freedom of movement

By: Adrian Cochino

Care centers in Canada were among the first places in the country to receive the COVID vaccine. By February, all residents of these Ontario homes had already received the first dose. But the restrictions have not changed. Dr. Samir Sinha, NIA Director of Health Policy Research, explained that the authorities were so afraid of the increase in deaths that they preferred not to relax the measures.

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Parkview Place closure sparks home care discussion

By: Katie May

Dr. Samir Sinha, Director of Health Policy Research for Ryerson University's National Institute on Ageing, is part of the team working on creating new national standards for Canada's long-term care system. The standards are expected to be finalized next fall.

Sinha said many of the issues at Parkview Place that led to widespread infections during the COVID-19 pandemic — including crowded quarters and lack of staff — are common systemic problems brought on by chronic underfunding of long-term care homes and management companies' razor-thin profit margins to keep them running.

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An aging Winnipeg care home is closing and many more need upgrades

By: Joe Scarpelli

It’s not clear how many care homes in Manitoba are considered outdated, but in Ontario for example, one in three beds are from 1972 standards, according to Dr. Samir Sinha, NIA Director of Health Policy Research.

“They’re not actually designed to meet the modern day standards,” Sinha said.

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Help improve long-term care in Canada by completing new Consultation Workbooks to support HSO’s new National Long-Term Care Services Standard

HSO's new Consultation Workbooks have been developed to ensure Canadians have a clear voice in the development of HSO’s new National Long-Term Care Services Standard.

The Consultation Workbooks can be completed by anyone who is interested in providing their input on improving the delivery of long-term care in Canada, whether you are a long-term care resident, family member, health care provider, researcher or anyone else.

HSO particularly welcomes those who have already completed their inaugural National Survey to complete a Consultation Workbook by responding to more specific consultation questions that arose out of the more than 16,000 survey responses, to help them better develop the new standard.

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Canadians died of COVID-19 in long-term care by the thousands. So why are there so few coroners’ reports?

By: Karen Howlett

Ontario went into the pandemic with an oversight regime that left it up to operators of nursing homes to flag any deaths that required investigating. As the virus spread, family members struggled against a system not necessarily interested in working for them, said Samir Sinha, NIA Director of Health Policy Research.

“Everything just kept on getting dismantled, so that there really became no mechanism in place for accountability,” he said. “We were just leaving it up to the homes and hoping for the best.”

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‘It changed everything’: Pandemic prompts science table adviser to seek Ontario Liberal Party nomination

Nathan Stall, a member of the province's COVID-19 science advisory table, is taking the leap into politics, seeking the Ontario Liberal Party nomination in Toronto–St. Paul's.

The pandemic changed everything for the people Stall cares for — he's a geriatrician with the Sinai Health System and older adults have borne the brunt of the virus.

In the early days of the pandemic, he authored groundbreaking research on the cause of catastrophic outbreaks in Ontario's long-term care homes that tied the tendency for bigger, deadlier outbreaks to occur in for-profit homes to their overcrowded outdated infrastructure, which influenced government policy.

He became a member of the province's science advisory table and a public advocate for older people, speaking out in the media about how the Ontario government and society at large were failing them.

"And it changed everything for me personally, seeing that I could be out there publicly advocating for something and advising, and trying to exact change and to protect vulnerable individuals," Stall told QP Briefing. "And that's something that I see coming out of this, the greatest opportunity for me to further that work as a public office. And that's why I've decided to do this."

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Fixing long-term care in Canada could cost $13.7B, budget watchdog estimates

A report published this morning by parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux estimates ending wait lists, increasing staff pay and benefits, providing more hours of care each day and expanding home care could cost around $13.7 billion.

Dr. Bonnie-Jeanne MacDonald, a Director of Financial Security Research at the NIA, said nobody should be surprised by the size of the figure, but added it’s time for Canadians to have a conversation about “what kind of Canada do we want people to age in.”

MacDonald said that report confirmed what those familiar with the system had known for years. But she said the pandemic didn’t just blow the lid off any illusions Canadians had about the standards of care homes for vulnerable seniors, it made most Canadians think they didn’t want to ever live in one.

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When privacy and public health clash: Vulnerable families face fear and frustration not knowing if health-care workers are vaccinated

By: Maria Sarrouh and Olivia Bowden

With most paid home care in the province coming from government-funded agencies, the vaccination status of the majority of agency workers is unknown, said Dr. Samir Sinha, Director of Health Policy Research at the NIA.

“The government is operating to a certain extent in the dark, as are the home-care agencies,” he said. Care co-ordinators who manage the contract between the family and the provider won’t be able to disclose vaccination status, as agencies haven’t informed them either.

Those who are concerned about older family members, someone who is immunocompromised or a child receiving care from an unvaccinated individual, may have to turn to the private sector, Sinha said.

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Israel to offer COVID-19 booster shots

People in Israel over the age of 60 will soon be able to receive a third dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine as the country deals with the delta variant. In Canada, experts aren’t sure whether a coronavirus booster shot is needed yet.

"Our bigger issue is that we just don't have enough Canadians or people around the world vaccinated with two doses of protection," says Dr. Sinha, NIA Director of Health Policy Research.

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'Fear ageism, not aging': How an ageist society is failing its elders

"You know, it's deeply disturbing when people start finding reasons to make our older people expendable or seen that they are less important than who they are," says Dr. Samir Sinha, NIA Director of Health Policy Research. We've almost doubled our life expectancy over the last hundred years, and somehow we operate in this framework that those who have aged in our society have become rather 'useless eaters'" says Dr. Sinha.

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Major vaccination push in Toronto

"About 90% of Canadians want COVID-19 vaccines. But we have this gap where 10-20% of people haven't gotten vaccinated yet. So we are trying to pivot to a hyper-local strategy, to bring events like these to communities,—to make them fun, easy and very accessible," says Dr. Samir Sinha, Director of Health Policy Research at the National Institute on Ageing.

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How has the pandemic impacted Canadians’ perspectives of long-term care homes?

It appears the pandemic has changed the way most Canadians think about their future with long-term care homes. Nima Rajan speaks with Michael Nicin, the Executive Director of the National Institute on Ageing.

"There's been a great awakening due to the pandemic on the circumstances in long-term care. What I think this speaks to is that the pandemic really took a disproportionate toll on long-term care settings. About two thirds of all deaths happened in these settings. This didn't go unnoticed," says Nicin.

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Will politicians listen and give seniors a real choice?

By: Salvatore Amenta

A recent survey by the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) and National Institute on Ageing (NIA) found that more than 90 per cent of seniors don’t want that. The survey found that seniors want to age in place.
They want to stay home or in affordable housing close to family and friends — in family-sized homes or apartments provided with assisted-living support from publicly-funded, non-profit agencies.

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A survey from the Angus Reid Institute found that four out of five Canadians say the pandemic altered the way they view LTC homes

"What people don't really understand is that long-term care, which includes the provision of home care and nursing home care, has not ever been part of what's called our Canada Health Act, so we underfund this part of the system significantly. It often operates in the shadow, because it's not fully integrated," says Dr. Samir Sinha, NIA Director of Health Policy Research.

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New poll says pandemic has changed how people view LTC in Canada

Guest host Peter Shurman talks to Dr. Samir Sinha, NIA Director of Health Policy Research about how Canadians feel about long-term care, and why we need more nursing homes in the GTA.

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Toronto restaurant praised for asking unvaccinated customers to eat outdoors

A Toronto restaurant asking unvaccinated people to sit outdoors is the latest to take heat for their policy, attracting backlash and the spate of negative reviews that seem to accompany publicly announcing such policies these days.

Medical expert and NIA Associate Fellow, Dr. Nathan Stall, called the honour-based policy a "great move" and like many, argues that this shows how a burden of responsibility has been placed on restaurants that should really belong to the government.

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Improving home care in Canada

"Whatever home care we are providing is largely inadequate and doesn't allow people to stay at home as long as possible. So there's a huge amount of work that needs to be done to not only better fund the system, but organize it so that we are maximizing the value of our home care system," says Dr. Samir Sinha, Director of Health Policy Research at the NIA.

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Long waits for Toronto-area nursing homes geared to cultural groups reflect need for more of them, report says

By: Michelle Meiklejohn

A recent study that looked at enhancing data collection in long-term care settings in Canada called for the government to collect a standardized set of sociodemographic information, including age, sex assigned at birth, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, language and Indigenous identity — something that many other countries, including the U.K., Australia and the U.S., already do.

"I think if we were to kind of take up this mandate and advocate for better sociodemographic data collection, we get a better sense of who's accessing and who isn't, and that will give us a sense of where to start directing policy and implementing measures," said Dr. Ashley Flanagan, NIA Research Fellow.

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Scarce data in long-term care homes may hinder reform

Despite the toll COVID-19 has taken on vulnerable populations, a new report from the National Institute on Ageing and Wellesley Institute — Leaving No One Behind in Long-term Care: Enhancing Socio-demographic Data Collection in Long-term Care Settings — shows there is a failure to collect this data, which means that inequitable effects of the pandemic may remain unaccounted for and inadequately addressed.

“This has implications beyond the pandemic as well,” says Dr. Ashley Flanagan, a research fellow at the NIA. “In Canada, health outcomes differ based on factors such as sexual orientation, gender identity, language, race, immigration status, and ethnicity, as well as access to affordable housing, adequate income and social inclusion.

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