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Ontario needs a lot more nursing homes run by local governments and non-profit groups, New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath says, instead of relying on profit-making private companies to fill in gaps left by public authorities.
“They’re close to the community. They see what’s going on. So using community-based not-for-profit agencies as well as municipalities to be the deliverers of those services is something I see as being a priority,” Horwath said during an Ottawa swing this week.
She spent part of it in the living room of NDP activist Emilie Taman in Old Ottawa South, hearing from people who have had loved ones living in long-term care homes. Five women, in fact, such as Doreen Rocque, whose husband Blake lived in long-term care for seven-and-a-half years because of his Parkinson’s. He had 70 falls — “seven-zero,” she emphasized — in six months at one point.
Rocque is now the chair of the Champlain Region Family Council Network, representing all of the Eastern Ontario groups of relatives of nursing-home residents.
Related
“They’re not designed for people with mobility problems,” Rocque said of standard nursing homes, which are typically built on efficient institutional models with long hallways and often-distant staff and volunteers.
Angela Pompeo told Horwath a story about her mother, who had a treasured bracelet stolen in her nursing home, an item from Italy she’d worn much of her life.
“They told me, ‘Well, you should have fake jewelry on your mom.’ She doesn’t have dementia,” Pompeo said. Her mother knows what she’s wearing and why and she misses it when it’s gone.
(Horwath’s own mother, who has Alzheimer’s, has had her dentures disappear while in care. On a trip to the dentist, Horwath learned her mother’s remaining teeth hadn’t been brushed in at least a week. Good teeth were a point of pride for the Horwaths, she said. So she’s lived some of this herself.)
Gail Matys talked about hiring private caregivers for loved ones already living in long-term care, at a cost reaching $60,000 a year.
Ontario’s best nursing homes are often non-profit operations, affiliated with communities bound together by ethnic or religious ties, Horwath heard. Matys praised the Hillel Lodge in Ottawa, but noted its long waiting list.
Even they have problems in a system that’s underfunded and overcrowded.
Ottawa’s long-term care homes, particularly the four run by the city, have been under scrutiny by provincial regulators since a personal-support worker was caught on camera punching an unco-operative resident with dementia at the Garry J. Armstrong centre earlier this year. The province has issued rare shape-up orders and top managers have fired frontline workers for abusing residents or failing to report others’ abuse.
Elizabeth Wettlaufer is escorted from the provincial courthouse in Woodstock, Ont., on Thursday, June 1, 2017.
Meanwhile, a public inquiry is looking at how nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer was able to kill eight people in southwestern Ontario, in three nursing homes and a retirement home, with overdoses of insulin over nine years. She’s also known to have injected others who didn’t die.
The inquiry should have a more ambitious mandate, Horwath said, like the commission that investigated how seven people died of bacterially contaminated water in Walkerton in 2000. People died in Walkerton because a slack local authority let poop into the pipes, but the inquiry found that specific horror was a consequence of systemwide problems. We got a wholesale renovation of how we treat drinking water.
Same deal with long-term care, Horwath said. The system that didn’t catch Wettlaufer is the same one that hires personal-support workers who aren’t temperamentally suited to being personal-support workers, overworks them and underpays them, and then they hit frail old people. Maybe there’s a connection.
“I don’t believe, whether it’s home care, whether it’s long-term care, whether it’s child care, frankly, I don’t believe we should be using public money to provide private profits as opposed to utilizing those dollars to create quality services,” Horwath said. “If I’m the premier of Ontario … my priority is going to be to expand into the not-for-profit and public division.”
Garry J. Armstrong long-term care on Island Lodge Road in Ottawa.
Ottawa’s notorious recent cases all involve homes that are actually owned by government. All three kinds of nursing homes (public, non-profit, for-profit) get paid the same per-patient fee by the provincial government, all three kinds contend with tight budgets, all three have problems. The stats show that privately run homes actually provide more hours of direct care to residents than Ottawa’s municipal homes do. But they typically pay their workers less, so they can get more labour for the same money. You can count minutes of attention but quantifying the quality of that attention is difficult. This is complicated.
Nursing homes are just starting to deal with a worsening onslaught of residents with dementia, who have different needs from people whose physical strength is failing. They’re just starting to see demand rise as Baby Boomers reach the ages when they’ll need more help.
All of which is to say that neither dumping money in nor running for-profit nursing homes out of the province is a sufficient solution.
We surely need more and better-equipped nursing homes, designed for modern needs, likely with staff doctors who can attend to residents without sending them to hospitals whenever they need, say, intravenous antibiotics. Who should run them? Cities don’t really want to. Calling on non-profit groups to take this on might work, but it’s not like they’re sitting around just waiting to be asked.
A public inquiry probably isn’t the right mechanism for telling a whole province how to design a residential health-care system for hundreds of thousands of people for the next 30 years. But it could at least name problems that we need to solve before they get worse, and that would be something.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
“They’re close to the community. They see what’s going on. So using community-based not-for-profit agencies as well as municipalities to be the deliverers of those services is something I see as being a priority,” Horwath said during an Ottawa swing this week.
She spent part of it in the living room of NDP activist Emilie Taman in Old Ottawa South, hearing from people who have had loved ones living in long-term care homes. Five women, in fact, such as Doreen Rocque, whose husband Blake lived in long-term care for seven-and-a-half years because of his Parkinson’s. He had 70 falls — “seven-zero,” she emphasized — in six months at one point.
Rocque is now the chair of the Champlain Region Family Council Network, representing all of the Eastern Ontario groups of relatives of nursing-home residents.
Related
“They’re not designed for people with mobility problems,” Rocque said of standard nursing homes, which are typically built on efficient institutional models with long hallways and often-distant staff and volunteers.
Angela Pompeo told Horwath a story about her mother, who had a treasured bracelet stolen in her nursing home, an item from Italy she’d worn much of her life.
“They told me, ‘Well, you should have fake jewelry on your mom.’ She doesn’t have dementia,” Pompeo said. Her mother knows what she’s wearing and why and she misses it when it’s gone.
(Horwath’s own mother, who has Alzheimer’s, has had her dentures disappear while in care. On a trip to the dentist, Horwath learned her mother’s remaining teeth hadn’t been brushed in at least a week. Good teeth were a point of pride for the Horwaths, she said. So she’s lived some of this herself.)
Gail Matys talked about hiring private caregivers for loved ones already living in long-term care, at a cost reaching $60,000 a year.
Ontario’s best nursing homes are often non-profit operations, affiliated with communities bound together by ethnic or religious ties, Horwath heard. Matys praised the Hillel Lodge in Ottawa, but noted its long waiting list.
Even they have problems in a system that’s underfunded and overcrowded.
Ottawa’s long-term care homes, particularly the four run by the city, have been under scrutiny by provincial regulators since a personal-support worker was caught on camera punching an unco-operative resident with dementia at the Garry J. Armstrong centre earlier this year. The province has issued rare shape-up orders and top managers have fired frontline workers for abusing residents or failing to report others’ abuse.
Elizabeth Wettlaufer is escorted from the provincial courthouse in Woodstock, Ont., on Thursday, June 1, 2017.
Meanwhile, a public inquiry is looking at how nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer was able to kill eight people in southwestern Ontario, in three nursing homes and a retirement home, with overdoses of insulin over nine years. She’s also known to have injected others who didn’t die.
The inquiry should have a more ambitious mandate, Horwath said, like the commission that investigated how seven people died of bacterially contaminated water in Walkerton in 2000. People died in Walkerton because a slack local authority let poop into the pipes, but the inquiry found that specific horror was a consequence of systemwide problems. We got a wholesale renovation of how we treat drinking water.
Same deal with long-term care, Horwath said. The system that didn’t catch Wettlaufer is the same one that hires personal-support workers who aren’t temperamentally suited to being personal-support workers, overworks them and underpays them, and then they hit frail old people. Maybe there’s a connection.
“I don’t believe, whether it’s home care, whether it’s long-term care, whether it’s child care, frankly, I don’t believe we should be using public money to provide private profits as opposed to utilizing those dollars to create quality services,” Horwath said. “If I’m the premier of Ontario … my priority is going to be to expand into the not-for-profit and public division.”
Garry J. Armstrong long-term care on Island Lodge Road in Ottawa.
Ottawa’s notorious recent cases all involve homes that are actually owned by government. All three kinds of nursing homes (public, non-profit, for-profit) get paid the same per-patient fee by the provincial government, all three kinds contend with tight budgets, all three have problems. The stats show that privately run homes actually provide more hours of direct care to residents than Ottawa’s municipal homes do. But they typically pay their workers less, so they can get more labour for the same money. You can count minutes of attention but quantifying the quality of that attention is difficult. This is complicated.
Nursing homes are just starting to deal with a worsening onslaught of residents with dementia, who have different needs from people whose physical strength is failing. They’re just starting to see demand rise as Baby Boomers reach the ages when they’ll need more help.
All of which is to say that neither dumping money in nor running for-profit nursing homes out of the province is a sufficient solution.
We surely need more and better-equipped nursing homes, designed for modern needs, likely with staff doctors who can attend to residents without sending them to hospitals whenever they need, say, intravenous antibiotics. Who should run them? Cities don’t really want to. Calling on non-profit groups to take this on might work, but it’s not like they’re sitting around just waiting to be asked.
A public inquiry probably isn’t the right mechanism for telling a whole province how to design a residential health-care system for hundreds of thousands of people for the next 30 years. But it could at least name problems that we need to solve before they get worse, and that would be something.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
