The Ontario Long-Term Care Association has some good news and some bad news for Waterloo Region.

It says more of the region’s nursing homes are ready to deal with a big increase in the number of seniors than is the case for Ontario as a whole.

But while that can be seen as a positive, the organization also says only 60 per cent of Waterloo Region’s LTC homes are ready for what’s to come – compared to 50 per cent for all of Ontario.

“We have seniors coming into long-term care homes much sicker, much more frail, and really, really needing a different kind of care than they needed even five years ago,” OLTCA CEO Candace Chartier said Thursday at a media event at the Trinity Village long-term care home in Kitchener.

The OLTCA is behind a province-wide push to rebuild those 50 per cent of homes that it says aren’t ready to deal with the aging population, including 20 of the ones in Waterloo Region.

Chartier held up Trinity Village as a model for other homes to follow.

“It’s very uniquely set up so that residents can just roam through the whole home,” she said in an interview.

 “It’s so bright, and so quiet and relaxing. You can tell that the residents have the ultimate quality of living here.”

In 2014, a CTV News investigation found that Trinity Village had the third-highest number of infractions of any long-term care home in Waterloo-Wellington.

In the 15 months since then, the home has chalked up 41 more infractions.

The most serious of those was a change order issued because half of Trinity Village’s beds had “potential entrapment concerns.”

Debby Riepert, the chief operating officer at Trinity Village, says the issue there was that regulations around bedrails changed, and bedrails meeting the new guidelines weren’t immediately available.

“We were putting on the appropriate ones, but when we ordered them, the supplier didn’t have the amount we needed,” she said.

Other infractions logged by inspectors include a month-long period in which 24 residents missed at least one bath. Two of those 24 went two weeks without a bath.

Other residents received what were termed “minor injuries” when they were left on a personal assistive device – which could be anything from a bedpan to a urinal to a toothbrush – for too long.

“The staff … didn’t follow the in-house policies,” Riepert said.

“Those were all addressed and corrected right away.”

Over the next 20 years, the number of seniors in Waterloo-Wellington is expected to more than double.