October 2024

We’re developing a roadmap, and we’re asking for your help.   Care Watch advocates for home and community support services for Ontario’s older adults, and we need to know what is most important to you. We are asking you to complete a brief survey. What you tell us will help guide our work over the coming months. It will also be the foundation for the questions we ask candidates (yes, we hear both federal and provincial elections may be coming soon). What happens in the elections affects the services we receive, so we want to ask candidates about what matters to you.

Let us know what’s important to you.

Help guide our work now and at election time.

As a starting point, here are some issues we’ve been working on along with some of our thoughts and questions.

• Access to home and community services. Are services available to everyone who needs them? Are they just as available to people living in the community as they are to those coming from hospitals? How easy is it for ordinary people to navigate through the various government structures to find what they need?   
• Privatization and profit in home and community care. How does government select the providers it will fund? What are the criteria, and how does the process work? What is being done to curb the growth of for-profit corporations providing home and community care? How are non-profit community-based agencies promoted and supported?
• Accessible and affordable housing for older adults. Home care and social supports can’t work for people who don’t have a safe and decent place to live. What is being done to provide homes for older Ontarians?
• Fair and equitable wages, benefits, and working conditions for the people who provide home and community services. Most of them are personal support workers, and they currently earn less than any other workers in health care. There are also many unpaid caregivers, who make personal and financial sacrifices to care for older adults.
• Standards for home care. How are we holding service providers accountable for meeting service standards? What are the consequences if they don’t meet those standards?
• Accountability to the public (that’s all of us). Providers are using public funds. How well are they doing their jobs? Are records of their performance publicly available?
• Ageism. When a government treats older adults as less valuable than other people, it can get away with indifference, condescension, and inadequate policies and funding. What is being done to combat ageism wherever it appears?

What can you do?

Please tell us what you think by completing this brief survey.

The survey will be available and we will be accepting responses until November 15. In the survey, we ask you what issues you would like us to emphasize in the coming months. We’ve provided a list of what we’ve been working on, and you may have other suggestions. What you tell us will help us develop a roadmap for our work now, at election time, and afterward.