EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been edited to reflect that Sienna Living owns Bradford Valley Care Community and Owen Hill Care Community, and manages Woods Park Care Community and Spencer House.
While long-term care homes across the province are seeing increases in reported COVID-19 cases, work is underway in homes across Simcoe County to temper the spread and keep it under control.
Of the five long-term care facilities experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks in Simcoe County, four are owned or managed by Sienna Senior Living.
“Long-term care homes are at the epicentre of this pandemic right now. There’s nothing we can do about that. We’re doing the best we can. Our team has put in extraordinary, heroic efforts to try and contain this,” said Natalie Gokchenian, director of communications for Sienna Senior Living.
As of Monday, there are six long-term care or retirement facilities in Simcoe County that either have or are experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks, as reported by the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit.
- Owen Hill Care Community in Barrie (one staff case, one resident case, zero recovered)
- Woods Park Care Community in Barrie (two staff cases, zero recovered)
- Bradford Valley Care Community in Bradford (34 resident cases, 10 staff cases [six local], seven deaths, total recoveries unknown)
- IOOF Seniors Homes in Barrie (one staff case, zero recovered)
- Spencer House in Orillia (one staff case, one recovered; outbreak declared over)
- There is also one case at a group home in Bradford, however Dr. Charles Gardner, Simcoe-Muskoka's medical officer of health, declined to provide the name of the home to media citing privacy concerns.
Sienna Senior Living owns Owen Hill and Bradford Valley and manages Woods Park and Spencer House.
On Monday, Gokchenian said testing is currently underway for all residents and staff at Owen Hill and Woods Park in Barrie.
“All long-term care facilities in various communities have been hit hard,” said Gokchenian. “If you look at Spencer House, that’s a good news story. They had one team member come down with it, they recovered, and they haven’t had a case since.”
Gokchenian said Bradford Valley has a large number of resolved/recovered cases, but they aren’t typically reported.
“We’re reporting the total number of COVID-19 cases, but not the resolved or recovered cases. Maybe we need to do a better job of reporting those resolved cases so it would give some relief to the communities,” she said.
During a media call on Monday, Gardner was asked by BarrieToday how many total cases had recovered at Bradford Valley, as the number was not included in the numbers released. He indicated that of the 10 total staff cases, five had recovered, but he didn’t have information on the resident cases.
He also addressed the outbreaks occurring at mostly Sienna-owned sites in Simcoe County.
“We have not seen any specific indicators of a facility-level lapse or institutional/company-level lapse that would explain a commonality between these locations,” Gardner said.
Sienna sent out letters to family members of its residents over the past week, which outline procedures Sienna Living says it has put in place to deal with the virus entering both facilities, including putting isolation protocols in place for the entire residence, frequently monitoring of all residents’ health, including temperatures checked twice daily and frequent cleaning and disinfecting of all surfaces.
The facility is also not allowing non-essential visitors to enter the premises, and are actively screening for any essential visitor, including temperature checks. Workers are wearing surgical face masks and having their temperature taken twice per shift.
Gokchenian said the facilities also opted to put in protocols asking all staff to only work at one home prior to the provincial directive being put in place.
“The majority of people who work in this sector, tend to work in multiple places,” she said. “We encouraged our team members – prior to the directive coming down from the province – to only work at Sienna.
"A large number of Sienna members did choose us," Gokchenian added. "Where we have seen reductions in staff, we’re doing a large amount of recruitment and working with other health partners in the community to get the staff numbers up where they should be.”
