Our family has been in the field of elder care for more than 70 years. We strive to create vibrant, active, inclusive communities. And yes, we are a ‘for-profit’ entity.
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By: James Schlegel
Re: New private long-term care deal hurts workers and residents (Ottawa Citizen, July 2)
The authors of a recent article in the Ottawa Citizen reignite the argument that any provider of long-term care in Ontario that isn’t a non-profit entity should not be in the service of seniors.
“For-profit long-term care homes put residents at risk, since they put the emphasis on profit instead of patient care,” they write. This type of blanket statement glosses over the many intense challenges Ontarians face when it comes to serving some of the most vulnerable among us.
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The “for-profit sector” is not one sector. It includes: private organizations, publicly traded organizations, private equity-backed companies, and family-owned and operated homes like ours.
In fact, the diversity of the LTC sector, which includes non-profit, municipal and private organizations, is one of its strengths. We need all providers working with partners across the health system to meet the needs of our growing seniors population. All LTC providers need to work, learn and innovate together to provide high-quality, person-centred care with a focus on life purpose for each older adult.
We are proud to partner with leading health providers such as the Ottawa Hospital to bring solutions to the challenges facing the health-care sector.
Our family has been in the field of elder care and community building for more than 70 years, since my grandfather opened our first care home in London in 1953.
We were referred to in Ontario’s Long-Term Care Covid Commission’s final report in the chapter titled, Best Practices and Promising Ideas, which stated: “Schlegel Villages is a family-owned mission-driven for-profit company that builds and operates long-term care and retirement homes. Its model is an example of integrating long-term care homes with outdoor space and the broader community, including access to medical and community services.”
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Furthermore, “mission-driven entities, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, should have the responsibility for the care of residents,” the commissioners stated in their recommendations to the government. According to the report, the key indicator as to whether a home provides excellent care to its residents is not whether the long-term care provider is for-profit or not-for-profit. It drew the key distinction between mission-driven providers “whose focus is care, not profits” and “those operated solely as ‘commercial’ enterprises.”
Our mission is to create vibrant caring communities with health and life purpose for each villager. We believe passionately in this mission and continue to invest in spreading it to more communities across Ontario so that more seniors can experience “village life.”
As part of this effort, we continue to invest in and create leading programs like our Living in My Today dementia philosophy (and many others), and in our team members, who are the heartbeat of our organization.
Beyond all of this, the Schlegel family founded and funds the Schlegel-UW Research Institute for Aging (RIA), an independent charitable non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life and care of older adults through partnerships in research, education and practice.
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RIA partners with many other universities and colleges across Ontario and currently fund 15 research chairs and more than 50 affiliate researchers connected to the RIA.
We also partner with some of the province’s top community colleges to train future caregivers in Living Classrooms integrated within our Villages, where leading edge research is incorporated into ongoing education. The beauty of this model is that existing team members, and most importantly, our residents, participate as “teachers,” which adds tremendous richness to the student learning experience and gives residents purpose and satisfaction as they educate the next generation of health-care workers.
All organizations in the field of seniors care need to create environments that focus on quality improvement, innovation and sharing, all leading to a high resident quality of life.
If the authors of the original article have not visited one of our villages, I would invite them to do so. Our team members, residents, families and friends are fiercely proud of the culture we have created and our mission-driven purpose to offer a social model of living that honours the lived experience of each person we serve.
James Schlegel is president and CEO, Schlegel Villages, whose locations include The Village at St. Clair and The Village of Aspen Lake in Windsor.
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