The province is now allowing up to four residents per room into Quebec's long-term care residences as a temporary measure to ease overcrowding in hospitals.

The directive is raising concerns and goes against a key recommendation of Quebec coroner Gehane Kamel in her scathing report into the disaster in long-term care homes in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kamel said there should only be one person per room.

"Nobody is happy about it," said Dr. Sophia Zhang, co-president of the Community of Practice for Physicians in CHSLDs. "It's something that we saw slowly disappear over the years."

Zhang said most of the mutliple-occupancy rooms were eliminated a few years before the pandemic.

"During the pandemic, there were shared rooms but with a max of two people per room, so that was a good thing, and we were even asking to go to private rooms, so this is kind of a step back," said Zhang. "I understand that it's a crisis situation now and elderly people are not well served being stuck in hospitals, so we want to get them back to long-term care facilities as quickly as possible, and that's why this measure has been put into place."

The province insists the move to four people per room is only a temporary change that's necessary to ease overcrowding in hospitals and a major backlog of Quebecers waiting for a spot in long-term care homes.

A spokesperson for the ministry of seniors called this an exceptional circumstance and said prevention measures are in place to reduce infection.

It is not clear, however, how long the temporary situation will last.