{"id":11463,"date":"2018-08-15T11:00:48","date_gmt":"2018-08-15T15:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/Life-Insurance-Blog\/ethnic-nursing-homes\/"},"modified":"2019-04-30T22:05:52","modified_gmt":"2019-05-01T02:05:52","slug":"why-do-people-have-to-wait-12-years-for-an-ethnic-nursing-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/2018\/08\/15\/why-do-people-have-to-wait-12-years-for-an-ethnic-nursing-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do people have to wait 12 years for an ethnic nursing home?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Does it all come down to funding?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Like any other area in health care, funding may be a contributing factor to the limited availability of ethnic-specific nursing homes. The funding needed to operate any nursing home in Ontario is standardized and comes from a combination of government subsidies proportional to the number of beds in each home, and monthly accommodation costs<\/a> paid by each resident (as of July 2018, $1,848.73 for basic rooms, $2,228.63 for semi-private rooms and $2,640.78 for private rooms). Depending on the nursing home, however, actual operating costs can exceed what is provided through these two sources. This is often the case for ethnic-specific nursing homes, which require additional funding to support their mandate of providing culturally sensitive activities and services.<\/p>\n

This is true at Dom Lipa, a 66-bed nursing home in Etobicoke that caters to the Slovenian community. Maria Muhic, a 94-year old resident who has been living there for the past 10 years and is currently president of its resident council, was among the initial group that helped establish the nursing home over 30 years ago, along with her husband and other members of the Slovenian community in Toronto. She recalls acquiring the financial support, land rights and even physically laying the brickwork of what eventually became the home itself. According to Muhic, the goal was to create a place \u201clike home\u201d where Slovenian immigrants could spend their aging years.<\/p>\n

Applicants can wait more than 1,900 days for a bed at Dom Lipa as it is currently the only Slovenian nursing home in the province. Despite long wait times, having only a single ethnic-specific nursing home for any given ethnicity tends to be the norm.<\/p>\n

However, for the Chinese community, two non-profit organizations currently operate seven ethnic-specific homes within the greater Toronto area, more than any other single ethnicity in the province. The Mon Sheong Foundation opened its first senior\u2019s residence in 1975, and has expanded to operate three nursing homes servicing a total of 457 residents. Tim Kwan, chairman of the foundation, attributes the rapid growth of the organization to both the size of the Chinese community and a strong demand for nursing homes. \u201cWe\u2019re quite large in the Greater Toronto Area so that the demand is there, there\u2019s no over-reaching,\u201d says Kwan.<\/p>\n

The other Chinese organization is the Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care, which operates four homes in the province with a total of 805 beds. Unlike Mon Sheong, Yee Hong has a few dedicated units for other ethnicities as well (Japanese, Filipino, South Asians), but still primarily services the Chinese community. Joseph Wong, founder of Yee Hong, thinks that his organization\u2019s growth stems from a mandate to build communities, rather than isolated nursing homes. Since its inception, Yee Hong has offered a continuum of services to the Chinese community, including recreational and social services, meal deliveries and senior community housing. \u201cIn order to serve seniors properly, you need to serve them with the appropriate language and culture, and you want to create a community atmosphere,\u201d says Wong.<\/p>\n

Currently, each of the nursing homes operated by both Mon Sheong and Yee Hong have upward of 4,000 residents on their wait lists. Even if they have enough funding to build a home, its construction also depends on government approval. The last time additional nursing home beds were approved by the government was in 1999 (20,000 new beds), but the current Ontario government has announced plans to introduce more than 30,000 new beds<\/a> over the next decade. How these beds will be allocated is not completely clear, but both Mon Sheong and Yee Hong<\/a> are hopeful that some of them will be allocated to their homes.<\/p>\n

Another group that might take advantage of the opportunity for new beds is the South Asian community. Even though South Asians make up the largest proportion of Ontario\u2019s visible minority population (26.9 percent, 2016 Ontario Census<\/a>), there are currently no culturally specific nursing homes serving their community. Maher Hussain, CEO and clinical director of South Asian Canadians Health & Social Services, thinks that a strong cultural tradition might explain the lack of South Asian nursing homes. \u201cIn South Asian culture, the parents prefer to be with their children, and the children prefer to keep their parents with them,\u201d says Hussain.<\/p>\n

Gurpreet Malhotra, CEO of Indus Community Services, adds that the many sects within the South Asian community might make it difficult to create a nursing home that is uniformly appropriate for all its members. However, Malhotra is confident that a home can be built to accommodate all these different cultural groups, and is currently in consultation with the government to establish a nursing home for South Asians<\/a>. \u201cIf it has a culturally appropriate focus on the South Asian community, it will be welcoming in that regard,\u201d says Malhotra.<\/p>\n

Building more homes may not always be the solution<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Considering that the development and operation of a nursing home is expensive, some smaller ethnic groups may not have enough local fundraising support, regardless of demand.<\/p>\n

\u201cEthno-specific homes are great for communities that have strong community power,\u201d says Seong-gee Um, a researcher at the Wellesley Institute. \u201cIn reality, it\u2019s not possible to have ethno-specific homes for every ethno-cultural community in Ontario, so it might make more sense to think about how to accommodate diverse linguistic and cultural needs in our mainstream homes.\u201d For this reason, Um suggests that future research should target improvement initiatives within existing mainstream nursing homes, where many ethnic minority residents end up residing.<\/p>\n

This was the focus of a recent report<\/a> conducted by the Ontario Centres for Learning, Research and Innovation in Long-Term Care (CLRI), which makes a number of recommendations on how mainstream nursing homes can create a more culturally sensitive environment for its residents. This includes hiring executives and front-line staff from different cultural backgrounds and collaborating with cultural community groups.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can each individual home, despite their cultural status, improve their care delivery by addressing the cultural needs of individual residents?\u201d asks Tammy Cumming, manager of the Ontario CLRI program hosted at the Schlegel-UW Research Institute for Aging (RIA). \u201cIt\u2019s more about the individual residents, wherever they\u2019re located.\u201d<\/p>\n

These recommendations perhaps speak to a broader philosophy of care that extends beyond the management of ethnic minority populations. \u201cWhat it comes down to is a matter of providing truly person-centered care, no matter who the person or group of people living in a long-term care home,\u201d adds Kate Ducak, a project officer at the RIA.<\/p>\n

As the current Ontario government plans on expanding nursing home beds across the province<\/a>, having a mandate to provide person-centered care would certainly be beneficial to all residents, regardless of ethnicity. It will also be of great interest to many ethnic communities how much of this funding will be used to support the creation of more ethnic-specific nursing homes.<\/p>\n

A previous version of this article used the term \u201caverage\u201d when describing wait times for some ethnic nursing homes, rather than \u201cnine out of ten.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that the CLRI program is hosted at the Schlegel-UW Research Institute for Aging (RIA), and that Kate Ducak is a project officer at the RIA.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Ethnic nursing homes offer residents familiarity and comfort and have even been shown to offer better quality of care. So why aren’t there more of them?<\/p>\n

The post Why do people have to wait 12 years for an ethnic nursing home?<\/a> appeared first on Healthy Debate<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11463"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11463"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14739,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11463\/revisions\/14739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}