Continuing Care: Get the Facts

Decades of underfunding and privatization in seniors' care have spelled disaster for Alberta seniors and the people who love them. We need urgent action from the Alberta government to ensure that everyone in this province has quality, timely access to the continuing care they need so that they can continue to live and age with the dignity they deserve.

Speak out for Alberta seniors!

Sign the letter to help advocate for seniors to have at least 4.5 hours of direct and accountable care

Here are the facts:

  • Seniors aren’t getting the care they need. People’s longevity is a testament to the high quality of our public health care! But it also means that residents in continuing care are often older, and with higher acuity care needs. Yet Alberta hasn’t increased our minimum care hour regulations since 1985, requiring nursing care homes to provide an average of at least 1.9 hours of combined nursing and personal services per resident per resident day. What’s worse, in 2024 the UCP government passed a sweeping new Continuing Care Act, which removed minimum care hours altogether! 
     
    Seniors care advocates and experts have long called for at least 4.5 hours of direct care for seniors in health care facilities. And new National Long-Term Care standards recommend a minimum of 4 hours of direct care per resident per day, but Alberta is yet to adopt those standards. Alberta’s Health Minister has said that the government is funding an average of 3.62 hours of care per resident per day, but without regulations in place, this amounts to little more than yet another blank cheque for Alberta’s continuing care providers to do with what they will. 
     
  • Profit doesn’t care. Alberta’s continuing care sector has long served as an extremely profitable market for private operators and their shareholders. But the fact is, every dollar that goes towards private profits is one that isn’t going towards care.
     
    For-profit continuing care facilities performed significantly worse as compared to publicly-operated facilities when it came to COVID-19 cases and deaths — a fact which was highlighted in two 2023 reports from the Auditor General. These reports highlight how decades of underfunding and chronic understaffing in seniors' care have spelled disaster for seniors and for the workers in the system, and they confirm what Friends of Medicare and other advocates have long been calling for: we urgently need for a new approach to providing care in this province.
     
  • Costs keep rising. Subsidized fees for residential continuing care cost Alberta seniors and their loved ones between $2,073 - $3,324 a month! As per Continuing Care Act regulations that came into effect this month, subsidized resident charges are allowed to increase by a maximum of 3.8% every year. For seniors reliant on the majority of homes that are non-subsidized, there are no caps on what operators can charge. And that’s not even to mention the ever-growing costs for essentials like care equipment and medications that residents are required to pay out-of-pocket. 
     
    Our system is set up to allow the best continuing care only to those who can afford to pay for it. But with fixed incomes, too many seniors are forced to rely on family members, or are otherwise left unable to pay for the care they need. All while operators are receiving millions of dollars in government funding!
     
  • The future of seniors’ care is still uncertain. The government is in the process of spending $85 million to dismantle Alberta Health Services, and split it into four separate agencies. The continuing care unit is scheduled to come on stream this fall, but significant questions remain as to how this newly siloed system of administering care is going to benefit seniors, rather than worsening wait times and making our already difficult-to-navigate system even more complicated to access. 
     
    The plan was announced without any consultation from health care workers, and Alberta’s health care leaders have since been speaking out against this massive overhaul, and the impact it’s expected to have on workers, patients, and our public health care system. 
     
  • Working conditions are care conditions. Alberta’s entire health care system is suffering from chronic short-staffing, and continuing care is no exception. In an attempt to rake in as much profit as possible, private continuing care operators have long relied on a precarious workforce of underpaid and often undertrained care workers, rationing the amount of time they are allowed to spend on critical care tasks for their residents, and tasking them with inhumane workloads that are impossible to fulfill. 
     
    Measures like legislated minimum care hours, staff-to-patient ratios, and paid sick days for workers would ensure that care workers are safe and supported in their workplaces, and equip them to provide the best possible care to their residents.
     
  • Seniors deserve better. Recent polling shows that 78% of Albertans support the inclusion of mandatory, enforceable standards for minimum care hours and staffing ratios in impending Federal care standards, while 84% of Albertans want the province to make significant investment in building more public continuing care facilities. So what’s the hold up?
     
    Alberta seniors deserve dignity, respect, and justice — we need our provincial government to start prioritizing seniors’ care needs, not private profits. And that means: