Lakeridge Health wants to build a new LTC home in Pickering
Published April 27, 2023 at 3:20 pm
When Lakeridge Gardens long-term care home opened in Ajax two years ago it was considered a model build, the first facility developed under Ontario’s Accelerated Build pilot program and has been cited twice since then for innovation.
The 320-bed long-term care home, noted for its nine-station haemodialysis unit, is the first LTC in Durham operated directly by Lakeridge Health and the health care organization wants to do it again, this time in Pickering.
Lakeridge Health President and CEO Cynthia Davis was at Pickering Council last week to pitch her idea of building a LTC home in Pickering and to ask for Council’s support.
“We need a bigger footprint for long term care in Durham Region,” she said, adding that building the facility in just 13 months “at the height of the pandemic” was a success story “we don’t tell enough.”
The proposed facility in Pickering is part of an “ambitious plan” for long term care in Durham, a region that she says is “under-served” for LTC beds. “This is needed for the entire country and especially for Durham Region,” she said. “It’s how we care for seniors.”
Davis also talked about the recent provincial government announcement of 20 undergraduate positions for doctors at Lakeridge Health Oshawa under a partnership with Queen’s University’s medical school, noting that it will help “fill the gap” in health care, with one million people in Ontario without a primary care physician.
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“We’re really excited about this.”
Davis also took the time to gently chastise Pickering Mayor Kevin Ashe for his recent efforts to try and get the Province to build Durham’s next hospital in Pickering, despite an independent Lakeridge Health panel’s decision the next hospital in the Region should be located in Whitby.
The preferred Whitby site, she reminded Ashe, is right on the Pickering border in north Whitby – “nine metres from Pickering,” is how she put it – and just eight kilometres from the city’’s growing Seaton community.
“We’re on a journey to meet the health care needs of the entire Durham Region community,” she said. “We knew going in to the process there would be only one site chosen.”
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