Midhurst/July 24, 2026 – The County of Simcoe recognizes and values the essential role that frontline long-term care staff play in supporting residents every day. We are committed to maintaining safe, respectful, and supportive working environments across our long-term care homes, while ensuring residents continue to receive compassionate, high-quality care.
Staffing pressures remain a sector-wide challenge affecting long-term care homes across Ontario. Despite these pressures, our homes continue to maintain stable staffing coverage and regularly meet all legislated care and staffing requirements. The union’s comments do not provide a complete picture of our current operations. We actively monitor staffing levels, workload concerns, recruitment needs, and health and safety matters, and take action where required to support both residents and staff.
Recent scheduling changes did NOT reduce or alter the full-time hours of front-line or nursing care staff. Rather, the changes implemented allow closer monitoring of overtime hours after it was identified that some staff members were working an unsustainable number of additional hours. These changes were implemented to help ensure adequate rest periods, reduce the risk of fatigue, and promote a more equitable distribution of overtime opportunities across staff. As a publicly operated long-term care provider, the County of Simcoe has a responsibility to support resident safety, employee well-being, and be responsible stewards of public resources through sustainable scheduling practices.
Our priority remains clear: delivering safe care for residents, high-quality care for residents, providing safe working conditions for staff, and maintaining sustainable staffing practices that support the long-term needs of our homes and the communities we serve.
~ Jane Sinclair, General Manager of Health and Emergency Services