New standards to be released today for long-term care homes devastated by the pandemic

Long-promised new national standards for long-term care homes in Canada will be published later this morning part of Ottawa's attempt to avoid a repeat of the alarming death tollsin long-term care homes that marked the early phase of the pandemic.

The Health Standards Organization(HSO) is publishing60 pages of comprehensive standards today, to complement the release of 115 pages of standards from the Canadian Standards Association Group (CSA) in December. The federal government launched the standards project in the spring of 2021.

Both organizations were tasked with coming up with standards to improve the quality of care in long-term care (LTC) homes across the country. The HSO focused on the care itself and the CSA on the physical infrastructure.

While the new standards are voluntary, health experts say they won't do the job unless LTC homes adopt all of them without exceptions.

"This is very much a kind of all-or-nothing thing. This is basically what the standard of care needs to be," said Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Sinai Health and the University Health Network in Toronto and chair of the HSOtechnical committee that draftedthestandards.