Two Canadian Provincial Initiatives During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Their Impact on Nursing Home Staffing

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Québec was the hardest hit province in Canada with close to half the deaths due to the virus in the entire country. The vast majority of those deaths occurred in long-term care institutions, or nursing homes. If these facilities had been chronically understaffed, as the pandemic progressed, low staffing levels became an even bigger problem as many workers left or became sick.1 For this reason, in April of 2020, Premier Legault of Québec requested the help of the army to increase the numbers of workers in nursing homes and the federal government agreed.