About Planning for Care
Sponsored by CUPE Local 5430, Planning For Care? shines a light on the Saskatchewan Party’s failure to properly plan for, or invest in, Saskatchewan’s long-term care system.
Spurred by large bed closures in Grenfell and Regina, in February 2019, the Saskatchewan Health Authority released requests for proposals to replace long-term care beds in the province.
Consistent with the Saskatchewan Party’s decision to open publicly funded health care to for-profit providers, these requests aimed to transfer publicly owned and operated long-term care beds to private, and very likely for-profit, corporations.
However, Planning for Care found that publicly owned long-term residential care is correlated with the highest quality care if adequately funded. Instead, over the past decade, the Saskatchewan government’s policies have reduced the number of beds available significantly and eroded service provision by removing staffing requirements that allow for dedicated care hours per resident.
Failures to plan for and dedicate sufficient funding to maintain the physical infrastructure of publicly owned and operated Special Care Homes, have left the sector to literally crumble.
Read Planning for Care’s final report Crumbling Away: Saskatchewan’s Long-Term Residential Care Policy and Its Consequences here.
Research Questions
- Who is caring for Saskatchewan’s seniors (and others) with frailty or complex medical conditions that require 24/7 personal care and/or medical supervision?
- What are the projected needs for residential care for Saskatchewan’s aging population, in terms of both numbers and geographic distributions?
- What is the policy plan for seniors’ residential care in Saskatchewan?
- How does this plan meet the projected needs? How does it compare to promising practices identified in other jurisdictions?
The Research Team
From the Care Work, Aging and Health Lab
Other Team Members
Asia Barclay
Research Assistant
Kiersten Jensen
Research Assistant