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Sharbot_Lake_Seniors_Home

Feature Article February 12

Feature Article February 12, 2003

LAND O' LAKES NewsWeb Home

Sharbot Lake seniors' home seeks funding from FMBby Jeff GreenThe Sharbot Lake Seniors Home (SLSH) is looking for help from the Frontenac Management Board and the provincial government. Before amalgamation, the home had negotiated a hostel agreement with the township of Oso. The agreement, which was funded 20% by the municipality and 80% by the Ministry of Community and Social Services, topped up the funding for residents of the home who were unable to pay the monthly rental fee.

Sharbot_Lake_Seniors_Home With amalgamation in 1997, and changes to the relationship between the province and municipalities that were brought in 1998, the agreement was suspended in the Frontenacs, and the Frontenac Management has never managed to reinstate it despite repeated requests to consider the matter from the Sharbot Lake Seniors Home.

However, that was not the case throughout the province. In neighbouring Lanark county, for example, hostel agreements have remained in place, although they have been capped since late last year.

Sharbot_Lake_Seniors_HomeWendy Tench, administrator of the Sharbot Lake Seniors Home, explains that the fee charged to residents at the SLSH is currently $1,275 per month. For residents that only have $900 per month available because they are living on a seniors pension, the home is currently covering the rest and absorbing the loss.

A hostel agreement would cover the difference between the ability of a resident to pay and the cost of the home. Essentially, for many eligible individuals, it would cover the extra $375 per month.

According to the owner of the SLSH, Dr. Peter Bell, a hostel agreement would be a step in the right direction, because the home takes a loss even at the $1,275 per month fee.

As a private seniors residence, the 35-bed SLSH is not funded by the provincial government, and currently individuals can not be funded by the province to stay at the residence. The same situation exists at the Bentley Retirement Home, a 20-bed home located in Godfrey.

The municipality of Central Frontenac is obligated to fund beds in Nursing Homes, and it does so by its ownership, through the Frontenac Management Board, of the Fairmount Nursing Home in the north end of Kingston.

In correspondence with the township over the past four years, Dr. Bell has argued that Fairmount Home is not chosen by residents of Central Frontenac.

Fairmount Home is rarely used by the Residents in Central Frontenac due to its location at the southern end of the county, he wrote in a letter to Mayor Bill MacDonald in October of 1998.

The FMB has embarked on an upgrade to the Fairmount Home in recent months, at a cost of $18 million dollars. The cost of care at Fairmount Home is $154 per day, or $4,620 per month (these are figures from July of 2000), but residents are eligible for subsidy through the province and the municipality, of up to $3,729 per month from the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care.

Since the hostel agreement was suspended in 1998, residents of the SLSH are not eligible for any subsidy whatsoever.

The difference in the two facilities is Fairmount is a Nursing Home, which comes under the provincial Nursing Home Act and is funded accordingly, whereas Sharbot Lake Seniors Home is defined by the government as an unregulated Seniors residence, and is not recognized by the Ministry of Health.

However, as Peter Bell points out, the two homes take in people in the same circumstances.

In a letter to Leona Dombrowsky written in March of 2000, Peter Bell wrote that he was seeking help in achieving 1) recognition by the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care that the care provided by the Sharbot Lake Seniors Home and similar rural Homes is needed, appropriate, legitimate and cost effective. 2) recognition that long-term care needs in rural, low population areas, such as Sharbot Lake, require unique solutions which differ from those which would apply to urban and more densely populated areas.

The funding the SLSH is seeking from the FMB would not solve all the problems faced by the home, and would not address the discrepancies between private seniors home funding, and public long-term care facilities, but it would alleviate some of the financial problems faced by the home.

By contrast, in Lanark County, the agreement that has been in place since 1998 has provided funding for 52 residents in 6 different locations throughout the county, according to Jerry Haughan of the County of Lanark social Services. It covers seniors as well as mental health patients, and is essentially a housing subsidy, Haughan said.

Claire McCartney of the Rideau Ferry Country Home, a seniors residence with 46 beds, said some residents of the home have been receiving subsidy under a hostel agreement with the county of Lanark, but late last year the county informed her the program was to be capped. We still receive funding for residents that received it before, but no new applications for funding are being accepted.

We were told by the Ministry of Family and Community Services they would not fund any new applicants, Jerry Haughan said, and we are waiting to see if the government enacts a draft document released in the fall of 2000 called 'homes for persons with special needs, which may replace the hostel agreements.

Haughan also said he had no way of knowing if and when that was going to happen.

With the participation of the Government of Canada