Tragically, most of Canada’s COVID-19 deaths have occurred among seniors living in congregate settings. Your leadership team assembled an independent Advisory Panel to study the situation. Please describe its key findings.
We convened a panel chaired by Dr. Bob Bell that included experts in geriatrics, public health, infectious disease, infection control, labour relations, architecture, healthcare policy and healthcare design. Their overall finding was that COVID-19 not only exposed cracks within the sector, but also the broken links between it and the system as a whole. This translated into a series of systemic breakdowns that allowed the virus to flourish in long-term care.
Among these breakdowns was a sector-wide shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) to shield staff and residents from transmitting and contracting infection. While is large enough to have our own strategic sourcing team and we always had ample PPE supply, smaller operators faced a critical situation for their residents and staff. A private-sector led initiative called (CAPES) launched in April to source and distribute personal protective equipment to smaller senior living operators when PPE was sent to hospitals instead of long-term care homes. Revera overfunded our PPE orders by as much as 35 per cent to make PPE supplies available to smaller operators. The equipment, including masks, isolation gowns and gloves, was distributed across multiple channels with the reserve supplying those small operators most in need.
