Still waiting for appropriate long-term care

In 2006, P.E.I.’s then-Conservative government announced plans for a Manor Replacement Program (MRP) to replace five public manors — Colville Manor in Souris, Riverview Manor in Montague, the Prince Edward Home in Charlottetown, Summerset Manor in Summerside and Maplewood Manor in Alberton.

However, following the 2007 election, the new Liberal government delayed the launch of the MRP while, “coincidentally,” similar amounts of monies originally budgeted for the MRP were pumped into the initial medical electronic records program, the Clinical Information System, which had gone seriously over-budget in its early phases. Finally, in late 2011, the first of the new manors opened, with the construction of the other four manors continuing through to June of 2019.

Strangely, though, despite being informed on many occasions that the Island’s seniors population would increase significantly through the first half of the century and that the demands for dementia care would increase in lockstep, the MRP did not increase capacity in the new manors. Why?

After trying to avoid answering the question, government officials finally admitted that they expected growth in long-term care — and dementia care more specifically — to be addressed by the private sector (subsidized, to a certain extent, by public funds).

To be fair, in the years since the MRP began, the provincial government did make some minor increases in the number of residents that the public system could handle. However, these increases amounted to a very small percentage of the expansion that was needed.

Consequently, a few private sector facilities were either built or expanded during that same time frame — although a couple of other small facilities were shut down, too.

Nevertheless, the bottom line is that Prince Edward Island continues to experience a significant deficit in seniors’ housing.

Recently, we’ve seen private-sector nursing homes take on additional dementia patients while, at the same time, many seniors in need of long-term care wait impatiently in hospitals for transfer to an appropriate seniors’ facility. They continue to occupy very expensive nursing beds that really should be made available for the needs of other patients.

Unfortunately, it’s too late for any significant “quick fixes.” Previous governments were warned about this looming problem for the past 15 years. The changes should have been made then; they can’t be made quickly now. However, the current government can acknowledge that mistakes were made over the past 15 years and that, going forward, changes can be made to adapt to current and future circumstances. If appropriate changes are not made, these problems will continue to occur in an accelerated fashion in the years ahead.

The King government needs to accept responsibility for the future long-term care of Islanders and commit to a publicly-owned and publicly-controlled expansion of the province’s long-term care system.

Personally, I favour an approach first proposed by the New Democratic Party of P.E.I. involving a number of smaller facilities in rural communities and areas that don’t currently have public manors.

As an aside, we should also remember that improvements made to long-term care now will also better prepare us to resist the challenges that may occur in future if we face another assault similar to the current COVID pandemic.