COVID-19 massacre: the permit of a private seniors’ home submitted to the courts

The Ford government is back in court Thursday morning to defend its controversial decision to extend the business license of Pickering’s Orchard Villa care home for 30 years, which has one of the worst COVID-19 death rates in Ontario. If the permit is renewed, the private company Southbridge Care Homes will be able to build a new 233-bed residence.

The Ontario Health Coalition will ask the Ontario Divisional Court to review the decision of the Ministry of Long-Term Care which approved a proposal in December 2023 Southbridge Care Homes to build a new residence at the current location of the home Orchard Villa.

She maintains that the authorization for the renewal of permits and the construction of a new building was not done according to the rules of the art and that it does not respect the law on quality care in nursing homes. long lasting.

During the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, 206 of Orchard Villa’s 233 residents contracted COVID-19 and more than 70 of them died.

Cathy Parkes knows something about it. His father resided in Orchard Villa, where he died on April 15, 2021.

She maintains that she saw how the establishment managed the crisis in terms of infection prevention and control, care of residents, cleanliness of the home and bedding, quality of food and shortage of staff.

In her affidavit, Ms. Parkes writes, for example, that she discovered that her father’s catheter bag was filled with a dark coffee-colored substance and marked with red streaks.

I don’t know how long the bag had been in this condition and why no one had noticed it sooner, but after speaking to the nurse, I was assured that it was simply a little blood from catheter changeshe mentions.

I had my father sent to the hospital, where it was discovered that he was suffering from acute kidney disease due to lack of hydration and a urinary tract infection, which had not been controlled by the staff.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Ms. Parkes affirms that the families of the victims have not forgotten the way in which their loved ones were mistreated during COVID-19 and that the government must change things in the allocation of operating permits for private long-term care residences or No.

She specified that the Orchard Villa home had refused to have her father hospitalized in April 2021 when he was suffering from coronavirus.

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What will happen to future residents who will be placed in Orchard Villa if the establishment is expanded for a period of 30 years? she asks herself.

She recalls that the living conditions in Orchard Villa were the subject of a damning army report, when soldiers were deployed to five Ontario long-term care homes to help staff at the start of the pandemic.

A journey catastrophic

Coalition executive director Natalie Mehra says Ontario needs to copy Saskatchewan, which took over ownership of five long-term care homes previously owned by the private company Extendin the wake of the pandemic. Thirty-nine patients died there from COVID-19 in just 62 days in 2020.

Southbridge has an unbroken record of non-compliance with rules, poor care and inadequate standards of care since 2015…what more do we need? asks Ms. Mehra.

If you issue them a new permit, what could a company do that is so blatantly violating the rules that the government would deny them a permit, because what could be worse than what happened at Orchard Villa ?

In the second part of its legal action, the Coalition will also ask the court to prohibit the ministry from taking other measures to facilitate the project, including providing capital financing.

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Parkes says Ontarians have a right to know how private long-term care facilities are using taxpayer dollars when the government provides capital for their expansion projects.

Ms. Mehra further notes that Pickering City Council unanimously rejected the request Southbridge to review the zoning of Orchard Villa based on its expansion plan, but that the province circumvented the decision of elected officials thanks to a ministerial decree.

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The Coalition adds that the ministry also acted illegally, by approving the expansion project without verifying whether it does not infringe the rights of residents listed in article 7 of the Charter. [droits à la vie, la liberté et la sécurité des personnes, NDLR].

The lawyer Steven Shrybman will ask the court to cancel the operating contract of Southbridge Care Homes if it turns out that the Ford government did not comply with the 2021 law by renewing the company’s license, which displays a catastrophic road map according to Ms. Mehra.

Under a change in the law, the ministry has for three years been required to conduct background checks on a long-term home before renewing its business license or granting it an expansion permit.

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In an email, a ministry spokesperson wrote that the citizens of Pickering deserve a new, modern residence and that the government believes it is more important to add beds in communities than to reduce their number.

To date, we have invested a historic $6.4 billion to build or improve 58,000 long-term care spaceshe mentions.

The ministry adds that homes like Orchard Villa are now submitted with the highest standards of care and safety in North America.

The company Southbridge Care Homes did not respond to our emails.