15 hours ago
Four N.L. care homes reach national standard for the first time in provincial first
Four personal care homes are now the first in Newfoundland and Labrador to receive national accreditation for their quality of care.
Fort Amherst Healthcare announced that all of the company's four facilities have been recognized by Accreditation Canada after a 2-year process of rigorous assessment to bring their operations to a national standard of care.
"What the accreditation process does is it holds up a magnifying glass to every piece of your operating procedure," Forth Amherst Healthcare President Mike Powell said at a press conference in St. John's.
Fort Amherst Healthcare's Accreditation Manager Cecilia Penney says it also requires facilities to create better systems to document their work, residents' experiences and manage incident reports.
More transparency was one of the many recommendations called for in the Auditor General's scathing report on the state of personal care homes in the province.
The report found instances of verbal and sexual abuse allegations, residents going missing and death. Some of these incidents are currently under police investigation.
The auditor general also expressed concerns that operational standards haven't been updated since 2007.
"We're talking about voluntarily adhering to a higher set of standards than what already exists from a provincial regulation perspective, " Powell said.
One of these elevated standards is with incident disclosure. When an incident occurs in a personal care home, staff have a protocol to make family or loved ones aware.
"I would say that an accreditation approach goes a little bit deeper and it says, how are you engaging with the people that you're disclosing things to?" Powell said.
Penney says the process has also brought benefits to staff satisfaction, leading to the creation of a wellness program to reduce burnout.
