Six years ago, we moved my mother into a nursing home. It was a good home. It was expensive. But she refused to go, and we had to have her declared incompetent. Six months after we moved her, she died there. It was a sad story. But, as I have been reading the news from Quebec -- particularly the news out of Dorval -- I give thanks that she will not have to live there in this crisis.
My wife used to work in nursing homes -- and the weaknesses in the system have always been glaring. Bruce Arthur writes:
The weaknesses in the system have been apparent for over a decade. The SARS report in 2003 mandated nurses should work in one facility only, but many long-term care workers — as many as 50 per cent — work in multiple facilities. B.C. banned the practice on March 27, over two weeks ahead of Ontario and Alberta. Facilities heavily rely on personal support workers, or PSWs, who are not medically trained, and start at $15 an hour. You can say they should be paid more, which is true.
The system, though, often stretches those PSWs, and doesn’t include enough medical supervision and care. In the face of COVID-19 — which stresses actual hospitals — and with either limited personal protective equipment or limited training in how to use it, is it any wonder that someone making $15 per hour would, faced with the nightmare of a sudden sea of feverish and deathly ill residents, simply walk away?
“Think about how quickly the patients will go downhill, and they absolutely know that they aren’t equipped to look after them, and (if) the hospitals won’t take them, then they have to look after them in place with no skills at all,” says Joy Parsons-Nicota, who has 45 years of experience as a registered nurse, a nurse practitioner, and as a nurse-educator at the University of Ottawa, specializing in geriatrics, and who also recently spent three years working part-time at a Kingston long-term care home. “You wouldn’t treat animals like that. No pain medication, no IVs when they’re dehydrated.
The coronavirus has exposed a lot of our weaknesses. One of the ugliest is the way we deal with our elderly. We can no longer rationalize the way we have organized their last years.
Image: Business Insider
