New provincial funding provides new equipment and staff training for Stratford-area long-term care homes

Two Stratford-area long-term care homes received a combined $80,000 in provincial funding for new equipment and specialized staff training aimed at helping seniors with complex medical needs, Perth-Wellington MPP Matthew Rae announced Wednesday.

Speaking at Kingsway Lodge in St. Marys – the long-term care home that got the lion’s share of the funding – Rae said the care home received more than $52,400 for the purchase of bariatric equipment and specialized dementia, palliative and wound-care training for staff, plus an additional $19,200 for the purchase of diagnostic equipment.

Among that diagnostic equipment, Kingsway Lodge operations director David Palmer noted, is an internalized normalized ratio device, which immediately tests how long it takes a patient’s blood to clot.

“It keeps everything in house, which is nice,” Kingsway Lodge nurse practitioner Kristen Palmer said. “We don’t have to send it off to the lab and wait for results. … Now I’m here in a funded position, so I can manage more in house. I can manage the wounds. It’s all about avoiding (emergency room) visits.”

Thanks to the provincial funding, two-dozen Kingsway Lodge staff members have also participated in LEAP Core palliative training, a course for health-care professionals whose primary focus is providing care for patients with life-threatening and progressive life-limiting illnesses. An additional 22 staff members also received Gentle Persuasive Approaches training, an innovative, person-centred approach to dementia care that seeks to better understand the behaviors, patterns and triggers that affect both residents and their caregivers.

Kingsway Lodge has also been able to purchase a bariatric bed that can support residents who weigh as much as 650 pounds, roughly doubling the carrying capacity of the home’s current beds. The bed also doubles as a cuddle bed that can allow a resident in palliative care to lay beside a loved one in their final days.

“So if you’re not using it for a bariatric patient, you can use it as a cuddle bed,” David Palmer said. “I ran a hospital in Newfoundland, and we used it all the time … in the end-of-life suite. If you’re in a single hospital bed, it’s almost impossible for a loved one to cuddle next to the patient. This is an extra-wide unit and it has extendable railings, so now a person can hop into the bed and provide some comfort at end of life.”

In addition to the funding allocated to Kingsway Lodge, the Spruce Lodge long-term care home in Stratford will receive $8,700 for the purchase of diagnostic equipment to prevent avoidable emergency room visits and hospitalizations.

“The whole focus of not just long-term care, but also in hospitals, is having the right care in the right place. That’s our government’s motto,” Rae said. “It’s really about supporting the long-term care homes in Perth-Wellington with the training and the equipment to make sure they can accept those patients who may have higher needs so they’re not taking up a hospital bed in Stratford or St. Marys .”

This local funding is part of a $20-million investment by the province this year in 189 long-term care projects across Ontario through the new Local Priorities Fund administered by Ontario Health.

“It is nice that homes can actually identify what their needs are instead of being told what they need to have,” David Palmer said of the Local Priorities funding. “We were able to submit our request, provide a rationale and, if the rationale was supported by Ontario Health, it was funded. … It seems to reflect the autonomy of a home to be able to advocate for what it needs and why.”

The Local Priorities Fund is part of the province’s commitment to invest $4.9 billion over four years to increase the average daily direct-care time provided by nurses and personal support workers to four hours per resident by March 31, 2025. This also includes increasing the system average direct care provided by allied health professionals to 36 minutes per resident per day by March 31, 2023.

As part of this commitment, the Ontario government provided $673 million to long-term care homes over the past year and is providing $1.25 billion to homes in 2023 and 2024 to hire and retain thousands of staff across the province.

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