Skip to main content

For-profit LTC homes attract fewer applicants than not-for-profit homes


Not-for-profit long-term care beds are more popular than for-profit beds
Government data suggests for-profit long-term care beds are less desired by the public than not-for-profit beds.   

There are long wait lists for a beds in long-term care (LTC) facilities.  (This is driven by the government's decision to add only a few new LTC beds despite the rapid growth in the number of people 85 and older, the main users of these beds.)

But some LTC facilities attract longer line-ups than others.

In early 2014, there were 41,842 beds at private, for-profit LTC facilities in Ontario (54% of the total of 78,138 beds). 

But only 6,781 people in the community put themselves on a wait list for one of these beds.  In other words, each for-profit bed has 0.16 people on the wait list for it.   

In contrast, there were 19,599 not-for-profit LTC beds (25% of the total), but 9,113 people put themselves on the wait list for them.  In other words, there were 0.46 people waiting for a not-for-profit bed.  

That is 2.9 times higher demand than for a for-profit bed.

Similarly, there were 16,433 municipal beds (21% of total supply) and 5,475 people waiting for them in the community – i.e. 0.33 people waiting per bed.  That is more than double the number waiting for a for-profit bed.

Accordingly, “time to placement” (the days it takes to get a bed) is much shorter in the for-profit LTC sector.  It takes 75 days to get into a for-profit bed versus 175 days to get a not-for-profit bed.  That is 2.33 times longer.

In the municipal sector time to placement is 108 days -- 44% longer than for a for-profit bed. 

It looks an awful lot like for-profit beds are less desirable to residents and their families than the municipal and not-for-profit beds.

Today's LTC facilities are not the same facilities as they were even a decade ago.  High quality care is becoming more important as LTC residents are getting sicker and more vulnerable every year. 

The not-for-profit homes association says that 40% of residents now have 6 or more formal diagnoses and that this group is growing by 7.9% per year.  A broad range of treatments, many highly labour intensive, reflect this increased need. So, oxygen therapy is increasing at 5.9% per year, administering IV meds is increasing 10.2% per year, and monitoring intake/output is increasing 11.8% per year

This while the government has cut in 2014/15 the annual funding increase for each LTC bed to about a-third of what it had been between 2009 and 2012.

Other noteworthy points:
  • There is significant variation in the amount of for-profit beds by LHIN.  For-profit beds are least common in the North West LHIN (29%of the total), the Toronto Centre LHIN (32%), and the North East LHIN (42%) .  They are most common in the Waterloo Wellington LHIN (64%), the Central West LHIN (65%), and the Erie-St. Clair LHIN (69%). 
  • Bed occupancy throughout the province is 98.6%, topping the government's benchmark of 97%.
  • The average length of stay in the system is 3.0 years

Photo: Sean McGrath

Comments

  1. When you say for-profit LTC, are you talking about publicly-funded LTC beds that are run by for-profit corporations, or are you talking about beds that are outside of the regulation of MOHLTC and the CCAC placement system?

    ReplyDelete
  2. In this piece, I'm comparing for-profit and not for profit long-term care homes that are publicly funded (both types receive the same sort of funding from the provincial government). Private homes that are not provincially funded, I usually refer to as retirement homes, rather than long-term care homes. I think that is the common practice in Ontario. Thanks for helping me clarify.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ford government fails to respond to 72% increase in COVID inpatient days, deepening the capacity crisis

COVID infections continue to drive up hospital costs and inpatient hospitalizations in Ontario. For the most recent fiscal year (April 1, 2022- March 31, 2023) hospital stays related to COVID cost $1.221 billion, according to new CIHI data.   This is about 4% of total hospital spending, creating a very significant new cost pressure beyond the usual pressures of population growth, aging, inflation, and rising utilization.   Costs for COVID related hospitalizations increased 22.2% in Ontario in 2022/23 from the previous fiscal year, rising from $999 million to $1.221 billion.  That rise is particularly notable as the OMICRON spike of late 2021 and early 2022 had passed by the the 2022/23 fiscal year.   The $222 million increase in COVID hospitalization costs came in the same year as the Ford government cut special COVID funding and, in fact, cut total hospital funding by $156 million.     In total, there were 60,653 COVID hospitalizations...

The hospital crisis: No capacity, no plan, no end

While Canada has achieved universal public healthcare coverage, that does not mean conservative forces have given up trying to erode that coverage and expand corporate care where it does not currently exist. The battle has become particularly intense in Ontario under the Ford Progressive Conservative government, which is implementing serious cuts to the level of care and moving to bring in for-profit mini-hospitals. Inadequate Staffing.   Less and less of hospital spending is on staff.   Employee compensation as a share of hospital expenditures has consistently shrunk in Ontario. This is not some immutable law of hospital development.  It is in stark contrast with the rest of Canada, where compensation has become a larger share and now accounts for 67.1%. Hospitals in provinces other than Ontario now have 18 percent more staff per capita than hospitals in Ontario. Overall, if Ontario had the same staffing capacity as the other provinces and territories, there would be another...

The long series of failures of private clinics in Ontario

For many years, OCHU/CUPE has been concerned the Ontario government would transfer public hospital surgeries, procedures and diagnostic tests to private clinics. CUPE began campaigning in earnest against this possibility in the spring of 2007 with a tour of the province by former British Health Secretary, Frank Dobson, who talked about the disastrous British experience with private surgical clinics. The door opened years ago with the introduction of fee-for-service hospital funding (sometimes called Quality Based Funding). Then in the fall of 2013 the government announced regulatory changes to facilitate this privatization. The government announced Request for Proposals for the summer of 2014 to expand the role of "Independent Health Facilities" (IHFs).  With mass campaigns to stop the private clinic expansion by the Ontario Health Coalition the process slowed.   But it seems the provincial Liberal government continues to push the idea.  Following a recent second...