Fewer Than Half of Ontario's Long-Term Care Homes Inspected in 2025, Watchdog Finds

Proactive compliance inspections are the principal way the province is supposed to catch problems inside long-term care homes before they harm residents. The Ministry of Long-Term Care set itself the goal of inspecting every home in Ontario each year. According to Concerned Friends, that goal was missed by a wide margin in 2025: fewer than half of homes received a proactive compliance inspection. When a stated standard is set and then quietly not met, the residents most dependent on oversight are the ones left exposed.

The conditions the report describes are why the inspections matter. Concerned Friends documented persisting abuse, neglect, and infection-control failures, along with resident-on-resident assaults — including sexual and physical assaults committed by residents with dementia. These are exactly the kinds of harms a regular, proactive inspection regime is designed to surface and prevent.

The watchdog's recommendations point at structural gaps rather than one-off failures. It called for a regulatory body for personal support workers — the front-line staff who provide most hands-on care but who currently lack a self-governing college — and for a dedicated registered nurse in every home. Both recommendations are aimed at building the standing capacity that inspections alone cannot supply.

The source of these findings is itself part of the story. Concerned Friends is a volunteer charity, not a government body, and has advocated for long-term care residents for more than 40 years. That an independent watchdog — rather than the province's own reporting — is the one publicly tracking whether the Ministry met its inspection target is a measure of how thin the official accountability picture has become.

If fewer than half of Ontario's long-term care homes received a proactive compliance inspection in 2025, the practical consequence is that the majority of homes went a year without the routine, unprompted check the Ministry says it intends to perform. The gap between a stated annual-inspection goal and the actual rate of inspection is the kind of shortfall that compounds quietly, home by home, until it surfaces in harm to residents.

Concerned Friends' recommendations — a regulatory body for personal support workers and a dedicated registered nurse in every home — set a benchmark the province can be measured against going forward. Whether the Ministry adopts, rejects, or ignores them will be a test of how seriously it treats independent oversight of the system it runs.

Because this analysis comes from a single advocacy charity rather than the Auditor General or a government audit, it also underscores how much of Ontario's long-term care accountability now depends on volunteers. A 40-year-old charity is doing the public tracking of an inspection target the Ministry set for itself — and the public record of whether that target was met would be considerably thinner without it.