CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. - The province has announced it will be providing funding to five private nursing homes to add 100 new long-term care beds for seniors across the province.
At an announcement at the Mount Continuing Care Community in Charlottetown on Wednesday, Health Minister Robert Mitchell said the facility would receive funding for 20 additional long-term beds. Sixteen of the new beds will be ready as of January while four more will be added in the spring.
In addition, the Gillis Lodge in Belfast will bring 10 additional long-term beds this fall and four additional beds in the spring of 2019. Le Coopérative ‘Le Chez-Nous’ in Wellington and Andrews of Summerside Inc. will be adding 12 and 30 beds, respectively, in the spring of 2019. Andrews of Stratford Inc. will be opening 24 additional long-term care beds this fall.
The province issued a request for proposals in July to private long-term care providers for the new spaces. In his remarks on Wednesday, Mitchell said the new beds would help ensure Island seniors had shorter stays in hospital.
"Adding these beds means more seniors can access the care they need closest to their loved ones. It will help reduce pressures at hospitals so that doctors and nurses can provide the valuable health care to their patients more quickly and efficiently," Mitchell said.
Mitchell said the funding is part of the province’s plan to tackle the challenges of its aging population. Currently, seniors make up 19.4 per cent of the Island’s population. By 2025, this number is expected to grow to 25 per cent.
"A year ago, we called for an immediate infusion of beds just to stem the backlogs in the hospitals. That's when it was needed. A year later, we should know better numbers."
-Sidney MacEwen
None of the Island’s public manors will see an increase in their number of beds. Mitchell said the province issued the contracts to private suppliers because they could bring the needed spaces into operation quicker.
"When we put out the RFP to those in the private sector, obviously, as we can see from where the beds are available, many of our private partners were ready to go,” Mitchell said.
There is currently a capacity of 595 long-term care beds at public facilities on the Island. Private facilities currently have a capacity for 1,147 long-term care beds. The 100 additional beds will bring this capacity up to 1,247 as of June 2019.
But Opposition health critic Sidney MacEwen says it is unclear if the 100 additional beds will meet the needs of Island seniors.
The PC MLA for Morell-Mermaid said he has not been able to find out how many additional long-term care beds are needed to lessen the burden on Island hospitals.
He said he has requested the province’s Long Term Care Bed Allocation Working Group appear before the legislative Standing Committee on Health and Wellness. So far, this has not happened.
"We've asked a number of times. There was always a reason why (not); ‘we're in the middle of it,’ ‘we're not done,’ or something didn't align. It was frustrating," MacEwen said.
"As a health critic or as a standing committee on health in general, we don't have the information to say, 'that's a good number, that's not a good number.'"
MacEwen said the most acute need for long-term beds was felt more than a year ago. As of November of 2017, there were 72 patients in hospital beds in P.E.I. waiting for long-term care.
"A year ago, we called for an immediate infusion of beds just to stem the backlogs in the hospitals. That's when it was needed. A year later, we should know better numbers," MacEwen said.
