Editorial guides
Practical articles, checklists and explanations built around Italian care homes, urgent placement, waiting lists and home-care decisions.
Featured guide
Co-payment structures in Ontario, BC, Alberta, Quebec and beyond: how each province calculates what residents pay, the rate-reduction safety nets, and how to budget honestly.
You find her drowsy, slurring, staring at nothing. A new drug has appeared that nobody explained. The seven questions, what provincial law says about restraining with a drug, and the public indicator you can look up yourself.
She has a fever and the home is asking what to do. What a transfer really does to a very old person, when it is clearly right, when it is often avoidable — and the legal list of who actually gets to decide.
A short phone call, "a little fall, she is fine". The questions to ask right away, what the home must report to the province, and why repeated falls mean something else entirely.
Withdrawals that do not match her life, a brand-new power of attorney, a grandchild who has suddenly become very attentive. The signs that matter, what the Public Guardian and Trustee can do, and what to secure in week one.
The home announces a discharge and gives you days. Before you take the first bed offered: the single most important thing to establish is which kind of home she is actually in, because long-term care and retirement homes sit under completely different laws.
Confusion that appears over hours or days and fluctuates within the same day is delirium — an emergency with causes that are almost always treatable. What to ask for today, and the reassessment a significant change should trigger.
Air conditioning in a resident's bedroom is required in one province and optional in most others. What that means for your mother, what changed after the 2021 heat dome, and six questions to ask before the next warning.
Worsened bladder continence is one of the quality indicators Canadian long-term care homes report publicly. So this is measured, home by home — and you can check whether your mother is an exception or a pattern.
Staff often call it two confused people not getting along. In most provinces it is suspected abuse, and the duty to report it to the ministry falls on anyone with reasonable grounds to suspect — including you, with protection from reprisal.
Most read
Co-payment structures in Ontario, BC, Alberta, Quebec and beyond: how each province calculates what residents pay, the rate-reduction safety nets, and how to budget honestly.
Why some families wait years and others weeks: priority categories, the home-choice list, crisis placement, the hospital route, and the moves that genuinely shorten the wait.
Publicly subsidized long-term care and private retirement homes are different systems with different costs, waitlists and rules. Which one fits, what each costs, and how families move between them.
A day-by-day plan for finding a good long-term care or retirement home fast — the provincial placement system, co-payments and subsidies, the shortlist, the visit questions and the paperwork.
