While attending the Eastern Ontario Professionals for Infection Control meeting with representatives from acute and long-term care, Mary Lynn says she saw an opportunity to talk about the goals of the campaign.

The campaign has an online poll, found at www.oltca.com, that asks participants to select their top five priorities in long-term care from a provided list. In addition, there are pamphlets available in member long-term care homes. OLTCA’s goal is to get 50,000 participants before the campaign ends April 16.

"Everyone was talking about how infection control funding has been cut," says Mary Lynn, "so I saw an opportunity to talk about the campaign." The majority of the participants at the regional infection control meeting were from the long-term care sector.

Mary Lynn provided the group with the website address and explained the goals of the campaign, which are essentially to identify the greatest priorities for the sector. She says most people were interested and planned on visiting the site.

Although the OLTCA campaign is not entirely focused on getting cash for the sector, she says there are expectations the campaign will lead to this end result. Mary Lynn anticipates most people would choose options on the ballot like ‘more staff to reduce the time to respond to resident needs,’ or ‘more funding for care and services’ as some of their higher priorities. In addition to the online voting, Mary Lynn says OLTCA has sent about two to three ballots for every bed to each member long-term care home.

"It’s about getting this Liberal government into a flow that regularly recognizes the value of the sector," says Mary Lynn.

West Lake Terrace will have a combined staff and family council meeting April 7 and then Mary Lynn will visit her MPP’s office along with another area administrator from a non-OMNI long-term care home April 23 to present the ballots.