A trio of new long-term care home projects in Hastings-Lennox and Addington County have been approved by the Ontario government, adding 69 new and 219 upgraded beds to the region.
Ontario’s Minister of Long-Term Care Paul Calandra was joined by Hastings-Lennox and Addington MPP Daryl Kramp and a handful of municipal representatives from across the riding at Lennox and Addington County General Hospital on Friday to announce the projects.
They include: Friendly Manor Nursing Home in Greater Napanee adding 36 new and 60 upgraded beds as part of a renovation while Stirling Manor Nursing Home and Caressant Care Marmora Redevelopment will add close to 100 new and upgraded beds each. Construction is slated to begin this fall and be complete by spring 2024.
“We are adding 69 new and 219 upgraded long-term care beds to modernize and expand three long-term care homes in Hastings County and Lennox and Adding County,” said Calandra. “That’s 288 spaces for residents to call home near their family and friends, as Daryl has said, in communities that they have helped build.”
“We are building brand new facilities across the province but the renewal of long-term care is really built on three pillars,” added Calandra. “It’s the staffing, improving staffing in care, building new modern and safe facilities and it’s also about accountability and transparency in how we undertake long-term care reform. Part of that is the largest build out in Canadian history. The largest investment in long-term care ever. Over $6.4 billion investment in long-term care.”
Friday’s announcement is an expansion of four previously approved projects in the riding that are currently underway: Village Green’s 62 new and 66 upgraded beds, 128 new beds at Mohawk of the Bay of Quinte in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, 128 new beds at LACGH and 128 new beds at Clare McFaul Long-Term Care in Madoc.
“We have a total of seven projects that are approved, four of them had been pre-approval, three brand new ones that just came through this week,” said Kramp. “A total of over 800 beds that will be able to serve, over 500 new.”
Kramp said the projects are particularly important given the demographics of the riding.
“One of the reasons this is so critically important, we don’t have an LRT line or a bus picking up people at every corner throughout this riding,” said Kramp. “We have a lot of people that have to drive one to two hours to see their loved ones. We have one of the longest waiting lists in the province, we have the second largest concentration of seniors in Ontario. The need is undeniably there.”
Included in the announcement is a commitment to invest funding to hire more staff.
“There’s no point in building these buildings without staff to support the people who live and call these long-term care centres homes,” said Calandra. “That is why we are investing over $5 billion to get us to a North American leading four hours of care a day in our long-term care system. That’s 27,000 additional health care workers in our long-term care sector and that’s nurses, PSWs, allied healthcare workers.”
LACGH executive director Wayne Coveyduck said the long-term care home on the hospital property has been a long time coming and credited Kramp for his hard work to bring the vision to reality.
“The facility is going to be all that we ever thought and hoped for,” said Coveyduck. “We really looked at a construction comparable to a long-term care of 75,000 square feet and we ended up that our construction is going to be a 118,000 square feet.”
Chief of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte Donald Maracle said the new facility would be an important one to the territory. He noted of the 78,000 long-term care beds in Ontario, just 223 beds are on a reserve.
“(First Nations) had one quarter of one per cent of the total beds in Ontario,” said Maracle. “Our proposed 128 bed facility is being developed, it will be on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory it will be on Highway 2. It will provide a unique and needed opportunity for our elders and other members of the community who are in long-term care services, supportive care facilities, right in the heart of our territory. Many of our people want to live at home and at home to them that means in the community where they grew up where our culture exists and their relatives live. That’s what home is to them.”
With Friday’s announcement, Ontario now has 26,090 new and 21,880 upgraded beds in the development pipeline.
Municipal representatives from across Hastings-Lennox and Addington were on hand for the announcement. Photo by Adam Prudhomme.