Ensuring services and care are there for older Ontarians in the communities they love and helped to build.
Ensuring services and care are there for older Ontarians in the communities they love and helped to build.
However, currently, too many seniors struggle to get that care and supports they need close to home. Many are forced to leave their communities, uprooting their lives and leaving behind family, friends, and support networks.
To meet the growing demand, Ontario has committed to redeveloping 28,000 long-term care spaces and adding 30,000 new ones – all providing publicly funded and specialized health care. This capacity growth is critical. When long-term care is available, seniors can age in place, access affordable housing and stay in their communities, surrounded by familiar faces and essential services.
And yet, to truly meet the needs of Ontario’s seniors, we need to reimagine long-term care as a community resource that strengthens the full continuum of seniors’ housing and care.
By integrating long-term care with broader community services, we can fill critical gaps in care and housing and offer individualized and flexible options. From transitional care programs to onsite health services and innovative housing models, modernized long-term care homes can serve as hubs that connect seniors to the support they need — when and where they need it.
Long-term care homes are evolving into seniors’ hubs, extending their reach beyond their walls to support aging at home through a new model called Long-Term Care Without Walls.
This approach to care promotes healthy aging in place by helping older adults and their caregivers access knowledge, resources, support and services. By addressing social isolation, increasing health-related knowledge, and empowering communities, these hubs enable older adults to live independently longer, in the community they call home.
Long-Term Care Without Walls is a collaborative effort between the long-term care sector, community services and families, leveraging the sector’s specialized knowledge in caring for seniors with frailty, and community resources to support flexible, community-based initiatives to better serve those in need.
Ontario’s long-term care homes are piloting and exploring more options to expand the care and services they can provide to their whole community. In New Brunswick, this model has shown great potential to leverage the expertise long-term care homes have in dementia care to serve outside the home, while alleviating caregiver stress. This model could have a significant positive impact on rural communities where senior and community services are limited.
Ontario is home to many culturally-specific, faith-based and linguistically-specialized homes. These specialized homes offer services to meet the unique needs of Ontario’s diverse population. For example, the Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care operates long-term care homes for Ontario’s Chinese community, offering services in Cantonese, Mandarin and English, along with culturally appropriate activities and cuisine. Toronto’s Baycrest is another leader in the cultural space offering spiritual supports, kosher cuisine and incredible volunteer supports from the Toronto Jewish community.
Culturally-specific, faith-based and linguistically-specialized homes and programs play an essential and unique role in long-term care. These programs offer a sense of community and belonging for seniors who may feel isolated due to language barriers or cultural differences.
Expanding access to culturally inclusive care strengthens Ontario’s commitment to equity while improving mental health and quality of life for diverse communities.
Campuses of care are innovative, integrated communities combining services and housing options for seniors so they can age in place.
These campuses provide a continuum of support in one location, allowing seniors to transition seamlessly between different levels of care as their needs change. They are also important for helping spouses and families stay together as their care needs change at different rates.
These integrated communities combine long-term care with independent living, assisted living, retirement residences, and social housing. They also offer essential health and wellness services, including meal programs, daily activities, primary care clinics, pharmacies, physiotherapy, and adult day programs.
By reducing the need for disruptive moves, campuses of care promote choice, stability, independence, and a stronger sense of community, ensuring seniors can age with dignity while maintaining connections to the familiar places and people of their community.
Expanding access to primary care is essential to ensuring seniors receive timely medical attention, while reducing reliance on hospitals. One promising approach is shared family care teams, which serve both long-term care residents and the broader community. By integrating primary care within long-term care homes and their campuses—especially in rural areas—these homes can become central hubs for comprehensive healthcare services, improving access for seniors and local residents alike.
This model strengthens continuity of care by ensuring that seniors receive consistent, team-based medical support without needing to leave their communities. Additionally, it enhances collaboration between primary care providers, specialists, and staff, improving outcomes while maximizing limited healthcare resources.
Ontario has committed to connecting every resident to primary care within five years, and long-term care homes can play a crucial role in this transformation. Embedding primary care within long-term care campuses not only addresses physician shortages but also creates stronger, more resilient healthcare networks—ensuring seniors receive the right care, in the right place, at the right time.
Seniors with complex medical and cognitive needs—such as mental health challenges—require specialized, high-quality care tailored to their unique conditions. Traditional long-term care settings are often not equipped with the infrastructure, tools, and training to meet the particularly challenging needs of these individuals effectively. Dedicated specialized long-term care homes or home areas with specialized services are essential to ensuring the right level of care in the right environment for those with the most complex needs.
Expanding specialized long-term care homes means creating safe, supportive spaces with highly trained staff, customized care plans, and purpose-built environments designed to enhance quality of life. A key area of focus is psychogeriatric care, which supports seniors experiencing severe mental health conditions alongside cognitive decline, such as dementia with complex behavioral symptoms. Dedicated psychogeriatric long-term care homes provide secure, therapeutic environments with structured routines, emotion-focused care, and staff trained in mental health interventions. These homes integrate multidisciplinary teams, including psychiatrists, behavioral specialists, and occupational therapists, to ensure residents receive personalized, compassionate support while maintaining dignity and well-being.
Outside of specialized homes, enhancing access to remote specialist care is also a key innovation in ensuring seniors receive the expertise they need without unnecessary hospital visits. Telemedicine and virtual consultations enable homes—particularly those in rural and underserved areas—to connect with geriatricians, mental health professionals, palliative care experts and other specialists in real-time. This reduces delays in diagnosis and treatment, allows for proactive management of chronic conditions, and provides ongoing support for staff in delivering complex care. Expanding virtual specialist networks within long-term care ensures that even in remote communities, seniors can receive timely, expert-driven care while avoiding the stress of frequent transfers to hospitals or distant clinics.
Investing in specialized capacity and expanding remote specialist access not only improves outcomes for residents but also helps to ease pressure on community services and hospitals, ensuring that individuals with complex needs receive care in settings designed to support them long-term. Strengthening these models reinforces Ontario’s ability to provide equitable, person-centered care, giving seniors and their families peace of mind knowing they have access to the right support when they need it most.
Alzheimer’s and other dementias are complex and progressive conditions. As of 2020, about 250,000 Ontarians were living with these diseases. A number projected to exceed 750,000 by 2050. When families can no longer provide care. Ontario’s long-term care homes offer essential support, including expertise in dementia and end-of-life care. Many homes are adopting emotion-focused models to innovate person-centred care for those living with dementia.
Emotion-focused care acknowledges and recognizes relationships, personal histories, and meaningful daily experiences over traditional task-based approaches. By creating home-like environments, fostering social connections, and tailoring routines to individual preferences, these models reduce anxiety and enhance quality of life. Personalized activities—such as music therapy, art programs, sensory engagement, and intergenerational interactions—help improve mood, reduce agitation, and create moments of joy for residents and their families.
Flexible, interdisciplinary care teams are key to delivering responsive, person-centered care. When staff can work across roles, strengthen trust and relationships with residents, and focus on emotional and spiritual well-being, they enhance dignity, comfort, and connection—ensuring that long-term care feels like home, not just a place for care.
Innovation is transforming long-term care, improving quality, efficiency, and resident outcomes. Digital health solutions—such as remote monitoring, AI-assisted care planning, and telemedicine—allow long-term care homes to deliver more proactive and personalized care to residents, reducing hospital transfers and improving safety. Expanding virtual access to specialists ensures seniors, especially in rural areas, receive timely medical attention without leaving their communities.
New approaches to staffing, training, and care delivery are also driving change. Smart scheduling systems, digital education tools, and simulation-based training help build specialized expertise while improving workforce capacity. Effective and innovative technology can streamline operations, allowing frontline staff to focus less on administrative tasks and spend more time with residents. Flexible staffing models that promote interdisciplinary teamwork enable staff to provide more responsive, relationship-based care.
To scale these innovations quickly, long-term care homes must pilot, test, refine, and share best practices across the sector. Strengthening collaboration between healthcare providers, researchers, and policymakers will accelerate the adoption of successful models. Ontario has an opportunity to lead in modern, technology-enabled, and person-centered long-term care, ensuring that seniors receive the highest quality of support now and in the future.
The foundational changes we need today to enable innovation and transformation.
The innovations shaping long-term care offer a blueprint for a stronger, more resilient seniors’ care system. However, realizing this vision requires targeted investment, workforce expansion, infrastructure improvements, and policy reforms to ensure we can meet the growing needs of a rapidly aging population. Key levers to realize this future are:
Build and upgrade homes to meet growing demand, offering modern, flexible design and funding solutions for care models and community hubs.
Unlock current government investments in seniors’ care that enable community services often overlooked in system planning.
Upgrade digital and IT infrastructure like remote diagnostics and security tools for better integration and efficiency throughout the health care system.
Shift to a more adaptable funding approach based on resident needs that provides predictable, stable resources, rather than rigid, pre-defined categories.
Build a sustainable workforce with nimble and flexible resident-focused staffing models.
Enhance supports for education, skills development, and interdisciplinary team integration.
Expand telemedicine and virtual specialist consultations to improve access to expertise, particularly in rural and underserved areas.
Build more capacity through enabling professionals to work to their full scope and enhance care delivery through delegation frameworks.
Foster a culture of quality through continuous improvement and learning, rather than rigid, compliance-based processes, to enhance outcomes, encourage innovation, and improve staff engagement.
Simplify regulations, address waitlists, and improve system efficiency to connect seniors with care faster and enable responsive care models.
Leverage real-time data and analytics to optimize care, track resident needs and care outcomes, and drive continuous improvement.
Strengthen collaboration pathways across government and health care, including integrated staffing and system planning.
Our shared vision for meeting the needs of older Ontarians today.