Top 30 Ontario long-term care homes with most reported violations

When a home is caught violating the Long-Term Care Homes Act during an inspection, it is issued a written notice that appears on its inspection report. Sometimes a written notice is accompanied by another notation that may require or recommend action by the home.

The following table shows Ontario's long-term care homes with the most written notices cumulatively from Jan. 1, 2015 to Dec. 31, 2019:

These numbers are aggregated from inspection reports pulled from the Ministry of Long-Term Care's website on Aug. 20, 2020. The "written notices" issued in those reports are sometimes accompanied by other notations that may require action from the home.

The harshest punishment that can be issued against a long-term care home at this time is a "director's order," which could include a temporary management takeover or a cease admissions order, which can cost a home money if the order sticks long enough to result in empty beds. 

Those orders are very rare — there are less than 40 posted on the government's website since 2015.

More often, homes receive a "voluntary plan of correction," (VPC) meaning they have to write a plan to correct the issue, which they can choose whether or not to carry out. 

Data analysis

Over 10,000 inspection reports from approximately 632 long-term care homes (626 current and 6 closed) with posting dates between Jan. 1, 2015 and Dec. 31, 2019 were scraped for total counts of violations of the Long-Term Care Homes Act.  The reports came from the government website. 

To examine the most serious safety offences, 21 specific violation codes were scraped to identify repeat offenders. The codes chosen were related to abuse, failure to report abuse, reporting abuse; infection control and prevention; medication errors, storage or management; neglect, indicators of neglect like failure to provide baths, insufficient hydration, poor oral care and nutrition violations. 

Not all violations are dangerous. Some may be related to lesser violations like food substitutions, etc. To account for this, we only included repeat offenders for the 21 most egregious violations in our analysis of repeat offenders.

This data was last scraped Aug. 20, 2020 and is accurate to that date. At least 5 homes in the database are currently closed. We have included their data in our analysis because they were open for all or part of the five year window.

Click here to see the methodology of our investigation and statements from those featured in our story.