Short answer: British Columbia has 301 long-term care homes with 28,869 publicly subsidized beds, plus 133 publicly subsidized assisted living residences with 4,334 units, according to the Office of the Seniors Advocate's 2025 directory. Long-term care is staffed around the clock by law, and residents can have visitors at any time. For a staff and visitor vending machine, that's an unusual combination: dozens of people on site every day, at every hour, in a building where the nearest shop may be a drive away.
This is for administrators, directors of care and facility managers at care homes, assisted living and independent seniors' residences in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. Every figure below is from a provincial source.
How big is the sector?
| Long-term care | Publicly subsidized assisted living | |
|---|---|---|
| Sites in BC (2024/25) | 301 facilities | 133 residences |
| Beds or units | 28,869 publicly subsidized beds | 4,334 units |
| Fraser Health | 80 facilities | 30 residences, 1,333 units |
| Vancouver Coastal Health | 55 facilities | 18 residences, 847 units |
| Operated by | 113 health authority (9,301 beds), 188 contracted (19,568 beds) | Not broken out here |
Source: Office of the Seniors Advocate BC, Long-Term Care and Assisted Living Directory 2025. Assisted living figures cover publicly subsidized units only; fully private-pay residences aren't included.
The sector is growing, and it's full. The Seniors Advocate reports 513 more beds than the year before and 1,437 more since 2019/20, while 7,029 people were waiting for a long-term care bed in 2025. The typical resident stays a long time: an average of 855 days, with a median of 537.
Who's on site, and when
Staff, around the clock. The Residential Care Regulation requires a licensee to ensure that, "at all times, the employees on duty are sufficient in numbers, training and experience" to meet residents' needs (s.42), and that residents have "at all times immediate access" to an employee with first-aid and CPR certification (s.43). The province describes long-term care as "24-hour professional supervision and care".
How many staff? The Ministry of Health's guideline is at least 3.36 hours of direct care per resident per day. In 2024/25, BC funded an average of 3.43 hours per bed per day (Fraser Health 3.42, Vancouver Coastal 3.48), and all but one site was funded at or above the guideline. The Seniors Advocate notes it "cannot validate if the funded hours are the same as the actual hours delivered."
Worked through for a typical home:
| Beds | Funded direct care a day (at 3.43 h per bed) | Equivalent eight-hour shifts |
|---|---|---|
| 60 | about 206 hours | about 26 |
| 100 | about 343 hours | about 43 |
| 150 | about 515 hours | about 64 |
That's direct care only, before kitchen, housekeeping, recreation, maintenance and office staff. Even a mid-size home clears the 30–40 people a day that operators typically look for, and because staff must be on duty at all times, some of those shifts are always evenings and nights.
Visitors, any time. Under s.57 of the regulation, a resident may receive visitors of their choice "at any time". Families visiting after work or on weekends are a second, steady group of users.
What the machine is, and isn't, for
A care home already has to feed its residents. The regulation requires at least 2 nutritious snacks a day, "each snack containing at least 2 food groups" (s.62), provided "at times that meet the needs of the persons in care" (s.64), and fluids "in sufficient quantity and variation" (s.66). The Seniors Advocate reports homes spent an average of $11.68 per bed per day on food in 2024/25.
So the machine's job is the people around the residents:
- Night-shift staff, whose meal break falls when the cafeteria is closed.
- Visiting families, who may spend hours on site.
- Contract staff and trades, in and out through the day.
Setting it up
- Pick the spot with the care team. The staff room, or a visitor lounge near the entrance, keeps the machine away from residents on modified or restricted diets.
- Choose the menu. Your people choose the menu: water, juice, lower-sugar drinks, coffee, and a mix of snacks. If the machine sells no soda, the PST rule for vending drinks doesn't apply (see our guide to PST and GST on vending).
- Go cashless for overnight use, and put a refund number on the machine.
- Agree restocking during the day, through reception, so it doesn't disrupt care.
- Check the terms. $0 to you: the operator covers the machine, install, stocking, service and removal; you provide the spot and an outlet (about $16–17 a month in power for a drink machine). Month to month, 30 days' notice and no-cost removal, as our host terms set out. Compare offers with the vending agreement checklist.
Our site-fit scorer rates senior living 23 of 30 for location type and scores the rest from your units, staff and hours.
About this data
- Facility, bed, staffing and food-cost figures: Office of the Seniors Advocate BC, Long-Term Care and Assisted Living Directory 2025 (fiscal 2024/25), published January 27, 2026, and its news release of the same date. Wait-list figure: the Seniors Advocate's Monitoring Seniors Services page.
- Rules: Residential Care Regulation, B.C. Reg. 96/2009, sections 42, 43, 57, 62, 64 and 66, current to 2026-09-22.
- Shift equivalents are our arithmetic: beds × 3.43 funded direct-care hours ÷ 8 hours. They describe funded hours, not actual staffing at any particular home.
- Limits: assisted living counts are for publicly subsidized residences only. The directory doesn't break out beds by health authority in the summary, so we show facility counts for Fraser and Vancouver Coastal.
Sources
- Office of the Seniors Advocate BC, Long-Term Care and Assisted Living Directory 2025: https://www.seniorsadvocatebc.ca/app/uploads/sites/4/2026/01/ltc-al-directory-report-2025.pdf
- Office of the Seniors Advocate BC, news release, January 27, 2026: https://www.seniorsadvocatebc.ca/app/uploads/sites/4/2026/01/nr-ltc-al-directory-2025.pdf
- Office of the Seniors Advocate BC, Monitoring Seniors Services: https://www.seniorsadvocatebc.ca/monitoring-seniors-services/
- Residential Care Regulation, B.C. Reg. 96/2009: https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96_2009
- Government of BC, Long-term care services: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/accessing-health-care/home-community-care/care-options-and-cost/long-term-care-services
All accessed 2026-09-26.