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Act Now to Protect Seniors

COVID-19 is ravaging nursing homes across the country. Care staff have an impossible workload, are getting sick and dying. Our seniors are suffering and dying by the hundreds. Act now to save staff and residents! Enter your information, scroll down and click on the green button to send this letter to your provincial and federal representatives, as well as ministers and officers of health. (Check boxes to select recipients.) Demand the changes needed to keep their promises to protect the seniors in their care, and the staff who care for them. Governments must:

Provide Proper PPE
Fast track rapid testing to enhance screening and detection
Allow more approved essential visitors for personal care and support
Suspend absence limits so seniors can temporarily go home
Ensure proper medical care and quarantine are provided

Enter your information, then scroll down and click on the green email button to send your letters.

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Last Name *

Email Address *

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Dear [recipient name and position will go here]

Your Letter *

Immediate action is needed to protect the lives of our seniors and staff in long-term care and retirement residences.  Due to chronic underfunding and understaffing, combined with lack of government COVID planning and resource allocation, COVID-19 has been allowed to ravage our long-term care homes.  Seniors and staff are dying.  COVID-19 will be a threat for at least 2 years.  LTC cannot go on like this.  I am asking for your support to immediately implement the following changes to increase the health and safety of the residents and staff in these facilities:

1.  Allocate enough PPE to LTC facilities to protect staff, prevent outbreaks and contain outbreaks if they occur.  Continue to supply and require masks to be worn by all staff and visitors until a COVID-19 vaccine or treatment is approved.

2.  Increase testing.  Current screening measures CANNOT identify asymptomatic COVID-infected staff or residents.  Make rapid COVID-19 and COVID-19 antibody testing available for testing of staff and residents as needed until treatment or vaccine is available.

3.  Allow more essential visitors.  Residences are recruiting inexperienced volunteers, even though families have been supporting the system for years by providing personal care for their seniors in LTC.  Take the burden off staff and ensure quality of care by allowing more essential visitors.  If a resident is unable to communicate, summon assistance or has complex needs, allow them one approved essential visitor at a time to assist them.  Essential visitors (family/private caregiver) to be designated and approved  in consultation with the director of nursing, to best meet the needs of the resident. Essential visitors will have the same requirement for screening, training and use of PPE as the staff and other volunteers, and be subject to the same restrictions on activities outside of the facility to minimize the risk of contracting COVID-19.  For example, they cannot be working in another workplace.

4.  Stop evicting residents who wish to stay with family and allow families to temporarily care for their relative at home until this crisis is passed.  Suspend the leave of absence regulations (vacation and medical).  Like daycare spaces, residents who continue to pay their fees will be entitled to keep their bed in the facility, and be able to pick up necessary prescription medications and medical supplies.  The reduction in occupancy achieved by allowing some residents to leave temporarily will improve social distancing for the remaining residents and reduce the heavy workload for LTC staff, much as the release of prisoners has done for the jails.  

5.  Transfer sick residents to COVID care facilities for quarantine and medical care.  LTC facilities are homes, not hospitals, and are set up to provide only personal care and basic medications and treatments.  Infection control protocols are not working against COVID-19.  It is unreasonable for the government to transfer half the acute medical care for COVID-19 into largely privately owned facilities, to be provided by our lowest paid healthcare workers, without the necessary training, equipment and space.  They are true heroes to have stepped up as they have, but must be allowed to return to their regular duties now that the COVID surge is passed in the community.  Proper medical care must be provided for COVID-19 patients, such as IV and oxygen, which are not available in the homes.  Effective quarantine is mandatory, and is impossible to achieve in full LTC homes with shared rooms.  Transfer all COVID-positive residents OUT of the homes to hospitals where they can be effectively quarantined and receive proper medical care, such as oxygen and IV’s for hydration.  Bringing hospital staff TO the residences does not address the lack of equipment or quarantine space.  If hospitals are not open to them as tax payers, then repurpose existing buildings (like empty schools) or build emergency hospitals specifically for COVID-positive seniors to safely quarantine and to be cared for by doctors and nurses with necessary equipment.  These COVID sanatoriums will be needed until a treatment or vaccine is available.

6.  Ensure that critically ill seniors have access to scarce palliative medications to provide comfort.

7.  Revoke the MOH guideline allowing staff who test positive to work 72 hours later if asymptomatic. COVID-positive staff must stay home until cleared according by obtaining two negative tests.  Hire additional staff.

8.  Revoke the policy allowing agency temporary workers to be exempt from the one residence rule.  Hire additional staff.

9.  Reinstate the complaints regulation so that staff can report unsafe conditions.

Give sick residents and staff a chance to recover.  Enable healthy staff and residents to avoid catching COVID-19.

On March 14, government demanded that families trust them to protect their loved ones.  They have broken that trust.  Please honour your pledge to protect our most vulnerable citizens and their caregivers.  Implement these changes now.

Respectfully,
[your name will go here]
[your email address will go here] [your location will go here]

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Act now! Send letters to your MP and MPP to demand changes to protect seniors in their care and the staff who help them.