Construction of LACGH’s 128-bed long-term care facility officially underway

Adam Prudhomme
Editor

A few shovels full of dirt were ceremoniously tossed in the air behind Lennox and Addington County General Hospital on Thursday, signifying the start of construction of a 128-bed nursing home.

Just a few hundred feet away an excavator was busy scooping much larger piles of dirt, a more tangible sign that work is officially underway.

“I had the privilege, a little over a year ago, of being on the other side of this building when we had some similar visitors to announce what was going to be happening here,” said Hastings-Lennox and Addington MPP Ric Bresee. “A little more than a year later we’re here to make sure this happens…On behalf of all the residents of Hastings-Lennox and Addington, of all the people that will benefit from this project, we know we have a need, we’ve seen the growth and I’ve got to mention this. That year and a bit a year ago there were announcements of over 600 long-term care beds in Hastings-Lennox and Addington. I was the warden of (Lennox and Addington County) at the time and I was so impressed with that. Then I become even more impressed with it when I found out that over the previous 15 years of the previous government, that’s the total number of new long term care beds that had been put into the entire province.”

The new state-of-the-art three-storey home at LACGH will be part of a campus of care, which helps integrate the long-term care home into the broader health care system and ensures residents can conveniently connect to the care they need. The new home will be adjacent to the existing local seniors centre, healthcare services and a satellite dialysis service, and will have partnerships with other local services. It will offer 32 negative pressure beds, which support infection control and operate as isolation rooms.

“This is the evolution of a complex organization,” said LACGH CEO Wayne Coveyduck. “You have the hospital and everything that a public general hospital does, but the long term care centre is going to be built onto the hospital so the move of patient flow back and forth is going to be connected. The next building is going to be connected to the long-term care centre. So everything that goes on there, that’s a complete health hub. With that connection to long-term care you’ve got all the primary care and allied services that’s available throughout the community. We were fortunate enough to be able to buy the building across the street that we’re turning into a development. So what you see right here is an entire health hub.”

Coveyduck noted this project has been in the works for over five years and credited previous MPP of H-LA Daryl Kramp for helping to get the project off the ground and where it is today.

The not-for-profit home will provide 128 new beds in private, semi-private and basic rooms in Napanee and is expected to be completed and welcoming its first residents in spring 2025. The new home will be licensed and operated by Lennox and Addington County General Hospital.

Ontario’s Minister of Long-Term Care Paul Calandra was also on hand to mark the start of the construction.

“We had had a challenge with the quality of care in our long-term care homes not because of the people who were working in long term care providing the best possible care, but because the government wasn’t funding them to the level that they need in order so that they could give back to their residents,” said Calandra. “We recognized that long-term care had to shift from being an institutional type of place of care facility and more of a home. We had to understand that when people go in to long-term care, it is their home. It is where they go to make new dreams and new memories and make new friends. We are transitioning across the province of Ontario into something the people who have worked in long-term care have known about for a very long time, they’ve always asked government to treat it like a home. That’s what it is. We are finally catching up to the people that have been advising us for a very long time.”

When asked if staffing the new home would be problem, Calandra pointed to health care staff recruitment programs currently being offered by the province.

“We started sometime ago putting in place programs that encourage people to get back into nursing, to encourage PSWs whether it’s the support PSWs to learn and earn, it is the programs for our nursing colleges and universities or career colleges to pay for the tuition of nurses, those who are training to be nurses,” he said. “It’s also the learn and stay program that we put in place whereby we will offset the costs of nurses who make a commitment to under-services areas. At the same time it is also about bringing on new doctors. We hadn’t increased the medical schools in this province I think in over 100 years. We were consistently relying on foreign trained doctors to come and supplement our health human resources, which is fine, but then when they got here we wouldn’t let them practice. We started to remove those obstacles as well that are in the way of people practicing when they get here and at the same time we are working very closely with the federal government so that we can get more trained health professionals into Ontario quicker.”

According to the Ontario government, the development of the new beds at Lennox and Addington County General Hospital is made possible by an agreement between the Ministry of Long-Term Care and the Ontario Financing Authority (OFA) which helps hospital long-term care development projects unlock lending and reduces borrowing costs so Ontario’s seniors have access to a range of choices for their long-term care needs.

The Napanee build is part of the Ontario government’s $6.4 billion commitment to build more than 30,000 new beds by 2028 and 28,000 upgraded long-term care beds across the province.