Community Partner Update
June 2021
Leading positive senior living and health system change is a peopleCare priority and we appreciate how people, organizations and entire communities have come together this last year in partnership and support of our Homes, and one another.
Partnering on resident-centred care
peopleCare Homes recently celebrated Caregiver Appreciation Week, with a huge “Thank you!” to our frontline teams – from nursing to personal support, dietary, housekeeping and maintenance – and including our family caregivers. We now support close to 600 designated family caregivers with education, PPE, rapid testing and other resources – 1,700 caregiver visits a week on average. Thanks to a research funding grant from Healthcare Excellence Canada, peopleCare is also collaborating with families, residents and partners to evaluate and improve our support of the family caregiver presence in LTC homes.
Giving back to the community with pop-up vaccination clinic
Teaming up with Southwestern Public Health to co-host a one-day pop-up COVID vaccine clinic in May, peopleCare staff helped deliver first and second doses to 439 people in a single day. For peopleCare, the clinic was an opportunity to give back to a community and partners who went above and beyond in supporting our Homes with the gift of vaccination in phase one of the rollout. COVID immunization is a success story across Ontario, with LTC Home outbreaks plummeting since earlier this year.
Piloting onsite COVID vaccines for LTC
peopleCare is shaping the future of how COVID vaccines are delivered in Ontario LTC, thanks to a successful pilot of onsite, timely immunization of residents, staff and families at our London, Ontario campus of care. Maintaining high vaccination rates in senior living settings is vital, especially with highly transmissible COVID variants of concern an ongoing threat. Onsite access to COVID vaccines ensures well-timed vaccination of new residents, staff and families, and adds to the layers of protection already in place in peopleCare’s LTC and retirement Homes. LTC homes have a decades-long history of working closely with public health to efficiently deliver onsite influenza shots each year: regularly achieving some of the highest immunization rates for residents and staff, when compared across different types of healthcare settings.
Development good news
In March, the Ministry of Long-Term Care awarded peopleCare 80 new LTC beds in Kitchener (in addition to our AR Goudie LTC Home’s current beds, and beds already approved for redevelopment), giving us the opportunity to deliver care and services for more seniors in the Region, create new jobs and support the local economy. A month later, we received a grant from the government that enables upgrades to the existing Home, which supports our goal for AR Goudie to be a place where everyone experiences exceptional care, in a welcoming environment, wrapped in the confidence that comes with leading IPAC practices and integrated technology solutions to support safe interactions and family connections. We are eagerly planning a groundbreaking celebration this summer for our soon-to-be constructed new 128-bed Meaford LTC Home and working hard to fast-track our Tavistock and Peterborough developments
Positively shaping the future of LTC
peopleCare is committed to working with government and partners to foster a culture and environment of high performance. At the OLTCA’s recent AGM, peopleCare Chairman and CEO Brent Gingerich was elected Board Chair for a second term. “I look forward to working together to improve resident care and quality of life, support our staff and families, and fulfill the LTC sector’s potential as an integrated and vital part of the health system.” Read Brent’s full message. Health system collaboration accelerated in this pandemic. To positively shape future of LTC and resident-centred care, we need to keep it up! That’s the underlying message of peopleCare’s feature story in the current issue of Long-Term Care magazine – Partnerships: Silver Lining of COVID – with input from valued hospital and association partners. After all, the path forward that most benefits our residents, staff, families and communities is undeniably the one we take together.
For a printable version of this update, please click here.
