by: Debra Boudreau, CEO, Tideview Terrace
After two years of incubation the much-awaited HSO LTC Services Standards were released on January 31, 2023. Along with these is a companion document, the CSA Z8004:22 LTC Home Operations and Infection Control Standards, quietly released in December 2022. The media hype about the standards lasted for a day and was overshadowed the next day in this province with the announcement of the One- Person-One-Record project. How typical that acute care takes the spotlight! One must not get too discouraged by this, albeit it was hard hearing that our Department of Seniors and Long-Term Care was not aware of the standards release date prior to its arrival. How could we be so disconnected?
Setting aside the political scene, I am celebrating the national standards release. For years our work in LTC has gone unnoticed, unrecognized and unvalued. These standards, albeit minimum standards at best, now exist to show that we provide skilled, complex care to a frail population, not just housing to “old people.” They also say that the populations we serve matter in society and need to be considered key priorities in the healthcare system.
Nothing in these standards is beyond our reach. In fact, many of us have been delivering care and services exceeding these standards for years. Much could be considered outdated, including the 20-year-old reference to 4.1 hours of care.
So, what to do with these standards? I choose to use these as a foundation to take stock of where we are as a facility and what is our next quality improvement initiative. I choose to review these as comparators to other foundational documents that ground the care and delivery philosophy that we follow as an organization. I hope government incorporates these standards in their licensing process and translates the statements into actionable metrics. Or better still fund us all to work with Accreditation Canada which plans to do the same (or CARF).
Much effort was put in the creation of these standards. They may not be all what we had hoped for our future, but they are something that we can work with. The next six months will be telling whether they will have any impact or whether they will sit on a shelf to gather dust for the next decade. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen!
We have an important part to play in this future path. What will you do with the standards today so that in two years from now we don’t look back and say “What standards?”
This Matters!
