Introduction:

The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO) is the professional association representing registered nurses (RNs), nurse practitioners (NPs) and nursing students in all roles and sectors within Ontario. Our mandate is to foster knowledge-based nursing practice, promote quality work environments, deliver excellence in professional development, and advance healthy public policy. We promote the full participation of present and future RNs and NPs in improving health, and shaping and delivering health-care services. With this mandate in mind, we are pleased to provide this submission to the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s Home and Community Care Review Expert Group.

The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO) is the professional association representing nurses, in all settings and roles across Ontario. It is the strong credible voice leading the nursing profession to influence and promote healthy public policy.

As RNAO outlined in Creating Vibrant Communities: RNAO’s Challenge to Ontario’s Political Parties, there is both a strong human rights rationale and compelling public health evidence that demands collective action on the social inequities that drive health inequities. It is completely unacceptable that in a province as affluent as Ontario that there could be a twenty-one year difference in life expectancy in the five kilometer distance between a high-income and a low-income neighbourhood in Hamilton. Just as we now strive to base decisions on how best to improve an individual’s health condition based on evidence and how to improve health-care services based on evidence, it is imperative that the Government of Ontario use clear evidence to reduce the avoidable and unnecessary premature deaths due to poverty and income inequality. This international multi-disciplinary evidence been compiled by the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. There is an international consensus that “governments have a responsibility for the health of their peoples, which can be fulfilled only by the provision of adequate health and social measures.”

The Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO) is gravely concerned by the recent precipitous movement by Health Canada to support the for-profit plasma industry thereby risking the safety and integrity of Canada's blood supply system.

On Monday, September 10, RNAO submitted a comprehensive approach to the MOHLTC for developing an evidence-based and integrated Seniors’ Care Strategy with the goal of improved mental, physical and social health outcomes, while leveraging existing resources, minimizing structural duplication and upholding a stronger publicly-funded, not-for-profit health system.