Long-term care homes running out of room, Official opposition says

The Saskatchewan NDP said seniors in the province may suffer if they find themselves needing a long-term care facility, due to a lacking number of beds to accommodate Saskatchewan’s growing senior population.

Speaking in front of Preston Special Care Home on Monday – the same care home an 86-year-old man with Alzheimer’s walked out, undetected, last fall, before later being found dead – NDP health critic, Keith Jorgenson, said the province had 181 long-term care facilities in the province in 2007. At the time, the province had about 8,944 long-term care beds.

As of 2025, the NDP claimed Saskatchewan has lost 20 of those long-term care facilities, dropping the total number to 8,823.

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While that number doesn’t seem like a drastic decline, Jorgenson said it will lead to some significant impacts.

“We have to remember that there are approximately 80,000 additional senior citizens today than there were in 2007. That’s a 53 per cent increase in the number of senior citizens, but we’ve seen an actual drop in the number of beds that are available in long-term care facilities should older folks become frail and need that extra help,” Jorgenson said.

“This is insane, and frankly, this has an enormous cost,” he continued. “There’s the human cost of often older folks living in undignified situations while they wait for a long-term care bed, but there’s also a cost to the overall system.”

Jorgenson said its not uncommon to see people wait for months to get a bed in a long-term care home, which puts extra pressure on the acute care and emergency systems in Saskatchewan. That also comes with an added financial cost, the health critic noted.

“It is so much more expensive to care for somebody in an acute care bed than in a long-term care facility,” Jorgenson said.

Barbara Sambasivan’s youngest brother, James, lives in a private care home because he suffers from myotonic dystrophy, a condition that mainly causes progressive muscle loss, weakness and myotonia and can affect other parts of the body as well, including the heart, lungs and eyes.

Sambasivan said that after spending 10 years in one home, James suffered a fall. After spending days in St. Paul’s Hospital, the owner of the private care home he had been staying in informed them that James’s condition was too severe for the home to care for and he would not be able to return.

“They sent him over to City Hospital, where he was in a ward with a large number of other seniors and people with disabilities. The whole hallways lined both sides, people in their wheelchairs waiting for attention or just watching the world go by, and it took six weeks for the CPAS organization to find him a place.”

Sambasivan said her brother likes his new place, which has a larger staff and offers recreational activities during the day.

“He likes the food there. It has turned out to be really good for him,” she said.

“I’m wondering where I’m going to go when it comes my turn to need nursing care. I haven’t seen any evidence of the building of facilities to house and take care of disabled folks and seniors who need nursing care,” Sambasivan said.

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