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The Ford government is trialling changes to a controversial long-term care law that allowed the province to place people into homes they hadn’t chosen, a move introduced to speed up wait lists and free up hospital beds.

The law, Bill 7, was introduced in 2022 and sparked concern from many in the long-term care space who worried about seniors being moved to homes far from their families or into unfamiliar settings.

As a result of the bill, Ontario’s cultural long-term care homes found more residents who weren’t from the linguistic or cultural background they catered to moving in.

Homes that deal with specific cultures or ethnic backgrounds and often provide programming in other languages — for example Italian, Ukrainian, Korean or French —  started to see the arrival of more people who weren’t familiar with the culture or language.

“Some stakeholders have raised concerns that there is an increasing lack of access to beds in LTC homes that serve the interests of an applicant or resident’s particular culture,” a new regulation posted by the Ontario government explained.

“There is a recent reduction in residents who ‘match’ the culture served by the LTC home and that these concerns have impacted the ability of LTC homes to support the respective ethnic, religious and linguistic services they provide to their residents.”

The change in who was being moved into cultural long-term care homes came because the province was using powers under Bill 7 to move people out of hospital beds and into the next available long-term care home.

Bill 7 is aimed at moving so-called alternate level of care patients — who can be discharged from hospital but need a long-term care bed and don’t yet have one — in order to free up hospital space.

If there are no spaces available in long-term care homes a patient has put on their preferred list, they can instead be transferred to a home up to 70 km away — or 150 km if they are in northern Ontario — selected by a placement co-ordinator at the hospital.

Now, the government is rolling out a pilot designed to ensure cultural long-term care homes are matched with the residents they were designed to support.

The proposed plan suggests that coordinators making decisions on where to send people could “prioritize” patients with similar levels of need if one is from a particular religious, linguistic or ethnic background and there is space at a corresponding cultural long-term care home.

“The intent of the proposed Pilot is to evaluate how changes to LTC waitlist prioritization requirements can improve Ontarians’ access to cultural, ethnic, religious and linguistically appropriate care within the broader placement framework and continued prioritization of applicants based on need,” the proposed regulation said.

The change only allows coordinators to make matching decisions if the patients are both of the same level of urgency. Less urgent cultural residents would not be able to skip past more urgent cases, even if they did not match the culture or language of a long-term care home.

A spokesperson for Ontario’s long-term care minister told Global News the change was prompted by discussions with long-term care home operators.

“Following consultations with the Ontario long-term care sector, the proposed regulation would enable the creation of a pilot program to evaluate changes to long-term care prioritization requirements,” they said.

“The changes to be evaluated would allow for residents that have the same urgency of need to be placed within a specifically designated home that better match their ethnic, cultural, or linguistic origins.”

The pilot is set to be “time-limited,” according to the posting.

— with files from The Canadian Press