Thank you, and I appreciate the invitation to appear before you today to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on women and, of course, the long-term care homes right across the country.
My name is Jodi Hall, and I'm here today as the chair of the Canadian Association for Long Term Care, also known as CALTC. We are the voice of quality long-term care in Canada, and our members deliver publicly funded health care services to seniors right across the country.
In addition to being here as a representative for CALTC, I did want to share with you that my roots are in long-term care. I started in high school, when I worked in food services in a long-term care home. Eventually I became a member of the care team and from there progressed to being an administrator of a long-term care home. For the last several years I've served as the executive director of the New Brunswick Association of Nursing Homes. I share that with you to show that my perspective is very operational, and I hope that it is helpful for the committee's perspective today.
There certainly are a number of areas of significant impact for women. As we have heard, this is a predominantly female workforce that we care for, and we commonly see issues related to child care and the many challenges around that, as well as the provision of care outside the homes to other vulnerable individuals, like aging parents. It does have a significant impact on the homes and their overall ability to manage.
I want to start the rest of my testimony by acknowledging the seniors who have lost their lives as a result of COVID-19, and we certainly extend our sincere condolences to families who have experienced a loss in that way.
I'd also like to pause and thank the front-line workers—again, many of whom are women—who continue to this day to provide very compassionate care to seniors in our homes across the country.
Some of these challenges that I'll be discussing have been exacerbated by COVID-19, but they represent many systemic issues that our members have been raising for several years. We believe that if the government had been proactive in supporting the sector, the impact of COVID-19 could have been mitigated.
This is an incredibly painful time for everyone involved in long-term care, including their families and front-line staff, and we fully acknowledge that and hope that our efforts as a nation become far more focused on stabilizing the situation in long-term care as we now face the second wave of COVID.
There have been differences in experiences with this virus among provinces and among individual homes, and that has been impacted by a range of factors—things like aging infrastructure, the staffing situation in individual homes, how rapidly homes were able to access PPE early on, and a host of other things, such as access to infection control specialists.
I'd like to focus the rest of my remarks today on the health and human resource needs. We are at a crisis point in Canada with respect to supply of health care workers in the senior care sector, and this is the critical issue that will make a significant difference for seniors as we respond to COVID-19 going forward. Between 65% and 70% of long-term care residents are women, many of whom have multiple, complex and chronic conditions, including different forms of dementia.
Attracting and retaining individuals who can provide the type and level of care that's needed has become increasingly challenging. Structured education and continued training are required to support health care aides, continuing care assistants and personal support workers—again, most of whom are women—in providing the highest quality of care. It requires a structured governance model to affirm the credentials, the conduct and the competency of these individuals.
To harness this opportunity, the long-term care sector does require the federal government to support policy changes aimed at solving the chronic labour shortage and aimed at supporting individuals to make the choice to have a career in long-term care.
Additionally, specific to COVID-19, the federal government has a role it can play in long-term care, including a dedicated focus on funding for homes across the country. We have been calling for predictable and stable funding for long-term care homes across the country. In our recent budget submission, we asked for $2.1 billion over two years to go to support PPE, staffing and other associated costs related to COVID-19 to ensure the health and safety of residents and our workforce.
We're also asking for additional support for recruitment and retention of infection control experts. We've also—