Plans to "radically drive up" standards of social care in Canada to protect the elderly must be drawn up and unveiled by the government.

They should include an online "good care guide" to allow family members to rate and review care homes and providers.I suggest more funding to improve the independent regulator.

Purposeful new plans would help to tackle "quality and mistreatment and family abuse".

As part of the plans, ratings for care and dignity standards for residential homes and home care providers would be published online, similar to the way websites used for booking holidays do.

It would include the latest information from inspections, plus any record of mistreatment or abuse by staff, as well as feedback from care users and relatives.

It should allow scrutiny teams to visit and speak to residents about their experiences. Committees featuring relatives of care users will also be formed to scrutinise services that do not meet standards.

However any formal inspection would still rest with the province

A system such as the one being looked at in the UK, hope it will provide a "more qualitative assessment" from the point of view of residents and their loved-ones of local care standards and would "empower people as never before" to choose the right care.

A provincial law could be used, be able to oversee duties placed on care homes which contain state-funded residents and to let representatives into their premises for visits. This could apply also to the minority of care homes with private-only residents.

Age UK said it did not want to see the proposals detracting from work already being done
Dr Sentamu said: "The current adult care funding system is widely acknowledged to be unfit for purpose and to need urgent and lasting reform.

"What is needed is a system for funding care which enables the risk to any one individual to be pooled, through taxation or insurance or, preferably, a mix of them both," he added.

"Age UK broadly welcomes the care home rating suggestion as a potentially useful addition to the existing system of care quality commission inspections and we have been calling for elements of the proposals for a while," a spokesman said.

"But most important is radical and urgent reform to ensure a fair and sustainable care system for the future, which is why we are calling for a white paper in the spring which embraces the recommendations of the Dilnot Commission."