Health
CanAge says new ON Long-term Care Legislation is promising, but vague in important areas
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CanAge, Canada’s National Seniors’ Advocacy Organization, is warning that while today’s newly announced long-term care legislation in Ontario takes several steps forward in critical areas for care in homes, it lacks clarity on many important details.
Long-Term Care Minister Rod Phillips introduced many long-awaited changes. This legislation embeds the roadmap toward ensuring four hours of care for residents: a long-sought after goal. It also emphasizes the role of essential caregivers, establishes harsher financial penalties for negligent home operators, and gives the ability for the Ministry to suspend the license of negligent homes while keeping them open: all key wins for seniors. But the lack of mention of person-centered care and clarity around how exactly these moves will play out in the real world remains cause for caution.
“This new legislation lays a strong foundation for transformation, but the devil is in the details,” says Laura Tamblyn Watts, CEO of CanAge. “Many of the promises made by Minister Phillips for real change are said to be in the regulations. But getting the right regulations in place in a timely manner will be the real challenge.”
“The whole long-term care system needs an overhaul,” she continues. “That is not what this legislation does. However, it does take important steps to move on long-neglected issues like hours of care, and provides a clear metric to hold the government accountable for that implementation. This legislation is the first real move towards improving the quality of care we’ve seen by this government, but it’s a long road ahead to transform the system.”
CanAge has been advocating for major changes to long-term care in the province of Ontario, including increased staffing levels with the necessary mix of skills to care for residents with increasingly complex needs, improved infection and prevention controls, critical facilities updates and a new focus on providing “person-centred care”.
“Even the best laid plans can fall apart in execution,” warns Tamblyn Watts. “More inspectors doesn’t mean inspections will happen. Penalties for negligent homes already exist, but don’t get handed out often enough. The Ministry will have to work closely with residents, family and the sector for a clear roadmap of how this legislation will translate to better care for Ontario’s seniors.”
CanAge is committed to working on these new regulations, with the Ministry of Long-term Care, to ensure person-centred transformation of the system.
About CanAge
CanAge is Canada’s National Seniors’ Advocacy Organization, working to improve the lives of older adults through advocacy, policy, and community engagement. We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization and backed by a broad pan-Canadian membership base. Find out more.
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Health
Interior Health delivers nearly 800K immunization doses in 2023
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Interior Health says it delivered nearly 800,000 immunization doses last year — a number almost equal to the region’s population.
The released figure of 784,980 comes during National Immunization Awareness Week, which runs April 22-30.
The health care organization, which serves a large area of around 820,000, says it’s using the occasion to boost vaccine rates even though there may be post-pandemic vaccine fatigue.
“This is a very important initiative because it ensures that communicable diseases stay away from a region,” said Dr. Silvina Mema of Interior Health.
However, not all those doses were for COVID; the tally includes childhood immunizations plus immunizations for adults.
But IHA said immunizations are down from the height of the pandemic, when COVID vaccines were rolled out, though it seems to be on par with previous pre-pandemic years.
Interior Health says it’d like to see the overall immunization rate rise.
“Certainly there are some folks who have decided a vaccine is not for them. And they have their reasons,” said Jonathan Spence, manager of communicable disease prevention and control at Interior Health.
“I think there’s a lot of people who are hesitant, but that’s just simply because they have questions.
“And that’s actually part of what we’re celebrating this week is those public health nurses, those pharmacists, who can answer questions and answer questions with really good information around immunization.”
Mima echoed that sentiment.
“We take immunization very seriously. It’s a science-based program that has saved countless lives across the world and eliminated diseases that were before a threat and now we don’t see them anymore,” she said.
“So immunization is very important.”
Health
Remnants of bird flu virus found in pasteurized milk, FDA says
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that samples of pasteurized milk had tested positive for remnants of the bird flu virus that has infected dairy cows.
The agency stressed that the material is inactivated and that the findings “do not represent actual virus that may be a risk to consumers.” Officials added that they’re continuing to study the issue.
“To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the FDA said in a statement.
The announcement comes nearly a month after an avian influenza virus that has sickened millions of wild and commercial birds in recent years was detected in dairy cows in at least eight states. The Agriculture Department says 33 herds have been affected to date.
FDA officials didn’t indicate how many samples they tested or where they were obtained. The agency has been evaluating milk during processing and from grocery stores, officials said. Results of additional tests are expected in “the next few days to weeks.”
The PCR lab test the FDA used would have detected viral genetic material even after live virus was killed by pasteurization, or heat treatment, said Lee-Ann Jaykus, an emeritus food microbiologist and virologist at North Carolina State University
“There is no evidence to date that this is infectious virus and the FDA is following up on that,” Jaykus said.
Officials with the FDA and the USDA had previously said milk from affected cattle did not enter the commercial supply. Milk from sick animals is supposed to be diverted and destroyed. Federal regulations require milk that enters interstate commerce to be pasteurized.
Because the detection of the bird flu virus known as Type A H5N1 in dairy cattle is new and the situation is evolving, no studies on the effects of pasteurization on the virus have been completed, FDA officials said. But past research shows that pasteurization is “very likely” to inactivate heat-sensitive viruses like H5N1, the agency added.
Matt Herrick, a spokesman for the International Dairy Foods Association, said that time and temperature regulations for pasteurization ensure that the commercial U.S. milk supply is safe. Remnants of the virus “have zero impact on human health,” he wrote in an email.
Scientists confirmed the H5N1 virus in dairy cows in March after weeks of reports that cows in Texas were suffering from a mysterious malady. The cows were lethargic and saw a dramatic reduction in milk production. Although the H5N1 virus is lethal to commercial poultry, most infected cattle seem to recover within two weeks, experts said.
To date, two people in U.S. have been infected with bird flu. A Texas dairy worker who was in close contact with an infected cow recently developed a mild eye infection and has recovered. In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program caught it while killing infected birds at a Colorado poultry farm. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Health
Canada Falling Short in Adult Vaccination Rates – VOCM
Canada is about where it should be when it comes to childhood vaccines, but for adult vaccinations it’s a different story.
Dr. Vivien Brown of Immunize Canada says the overall population should have rates of between 80 and 90 per cent for most vaccines, but that is not the case.
She says most children are in that range but not for adult vaccines and ultimately the most at-risk populations are not being reached.
She says the population is under immunized for conditions such as pneumonia, shingles, tetanus, and pertussis.
Brown wants people to talk with their family physician or pharmacist to see if they are up-to-date on vaccines, and to get caught up because many are “killer diseases.”
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