Seniors’ advocate calls for urgent action in long-term care report
Press Release
13 March 2024
FREDERICTON – The province’s long-term care system needs urgent action if New Brunswickers are going to feel safe relying upon it, according to a new report from Child, Youth and Seniors’ Advocate Kelly Lamrock.
In What We All Want, a review of the province’s long-term care system, Lamrock identified seven areas for immediate government action:
● Fixing a broken and disjointed needs-assessment system so that families get the right help.
● Better integrating different types of care so that patients move easily through the system.
● Holding the system accountable and ensuring that patients and their families are heard.
● Improving human resources planning and retaining staff at all levels of care.
● Ensuring that the system is better funded and less bureaucratic to ensure quality care.
● Providing better and more accessible supports to support care in people’s homes.
● Supporting the unique needs of people with disabilities and planning for the future.
“We heard from 300 New Brunswickers and more than 50 experts and organizations in preparing this report,” said Lamrock. “We heard loud and clear that New Brunswickers want to feel they can trust that the necessary support will be there when we need help caring for ourselves. We also heard loud and clear that the trust is not yet there. There are good people providing long-term care, but the system that supports, encourages and funds their work is not yet there.”
The report offers recommendations to improve the system, including:
● Establishing one financial assessment so that families do not have to repeat intake every time a patient’s care needs change.
● Increasing funding for inspections, increasing the use of unplanned inspections and establishing a provincial offence for reprisals against whistleblowers.
● Developing a separate process for needs assessment and financial support so that patients’ needs are not shortchanged for financial reasons.
● Modernizing support programs for people with disabilities and setting hard targets to move people with disabilities out of overly institutional care.
● Improving incentives for aging at home through better respite care for family caregivers, expanding eligibility for home support programs and establishing a caregivers’ network.
● Improving recruitment and retention of front-line staff by offering better training and higher wages, and harmonizing wages for workers in different areas of long-term care.
● Decentralizing the powers of the Department of Social Development in program delivery to community-based governing bodies who oversee the full continuum of care, while preserving the department’s role in setting standards, reporting results and equalizing funding.
● Improving reporting of key performance indicators and establishing a process to investigate variations in outcomes between regions and facilities.
● Providing mandatory and ongoing training for board members, managers, inspectors and social workers in areas which impact patients most.
● Making the system more affordable by regulating core services and extra charges, capping daily contributions and establishing a transparent, public process for setting rates and funding.
● Providing more flexible definitions of levels of care to allow for a more responsive system.
“Too often, getting people the right care and making sure they can afford it is held up by overly bureaucratic structures,” said Lamrock. “We need to make sure that the system meets the person’s needs rather than making the person prove they fit the system’s rules.”
Earlier this week, in a report titled How It All Broke, Lamrock made 10 recommendations that called on the government to change the way it plans for budgets and manages social policy to avoid a breakdown of social programs.
“I would repeat that there is no point in pushing social departments to do better if we do not fix a governance structure that does not plan human resource needs, puts following the process over getting results, budgets without setting targets, and funds crises but not planning,” said Lamrock. “Whether it is long-term care, urgent care, child protection, family courts or classroom education, the centre of government needs to be fixed to support social programs before several systems break down at once.”
The advocate also pointed to two areas where the government should provide concrete, funded plans to the legislative assembly before June 30: getting New Brunswick to the national average in terms of hours of care, and getting seniors waiting in hospital beds into long-term care.
“As part of this process, I quietly interviewed a number of health-care workers who are not the bosses, but the care providers,” said Lamrock. “The stories they told me – about seniors crying because they are waiting for the most basic things, like being helped back to bed, being bathed and changed, being able to exercise, or just the kindness of someone getting them food they like to eat – those stories upset these care providers, and they upset me. It is time to set hard targets for getting seniors the proper hours of care and get them out of hospital beds if they do not belong in one. It is no longer enough for the government to list the actions they undertake or the effort they are expending. It is time to set hard targets for results.”
Lamrock noted the urgency and concern New Brunswickers feel with respect to the long-term care system.
“Of all the topics I have reviewed in my three decades of public policy work, few would match this one in terms of the urgency of the work, the anxiety of the people affected and the skepticism that one report will change anything,” said Lamrock. “I must communicate this hard truth to the government: people are genuinely shaken by the state of our health-care services.”
Media Contact(s)
Sarah Wagner, deputy advocate of public affairs, Office of the Child, Youth and Seniors’ Advocate, 506-453-2789, sarah.wagner@gnb.ca.
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