More financial help for retirement homes as they continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Ontario government is sending $30-million to be used for training and testing and purchasing items like cleaning products and personal protective equipment.
Locally, just under $1.2-million wilI be going to 31 homes in Windsor-Essex and Chatham-Kent-Leamington.
Conservative MPP for Chatham-Kent-Leamington, Rick Nicholls, says this funding focuses on just retirement homes.
"We're moving from long-term care into retirement homes. Slightly different, the people in the retirement homes don't need quite the care that someone in long-term care would require, but they are still vulnerable. We want to ensure that the staff and the residents of these retirement homes are kept safe and secure," he says.
Nicholls says this is a big sector that needs some help.
"Ontario has more than 770 licensed retirement homes. That's a lot. We know that our retirement home operators are working tirelessly to stop the spread. It's always been the primary goal our government, to keep Ontarians safe and healthy," he says.
He says this is just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
"We have to look at the greater whole and realize that we want to get the economy back to work, but the frustrating part is that the economy won't roll if we have sick people. So we need healthy people and then we get people back to work and the economy becomes healthy once again," he says.
The new batch of funding comes in addition to $30.9-million from the province given to retirement homes earlier in the pandemic.