Suit filed against Vigi Mont Royal alleges unsanitary conditions
A lawsuit filed at the Montreal courthouse alleges that one of the CHSLDS hardest hit by the COVID -19 pandemic was unsanitary and had poorly trained staff before the coronavirus spread through the city.
The lawsuit was filed on March 12 by sisters Georgia and Antonia Andreadakis. Their 84-year-old mother, Maria Drimonakos, died last summer while she was a resident of the Vigi Mont Royal, a 273bed CHSLD in Town of Mont Royal where, as of Tuesday, 157 residents have been found to have COVID -19. Vigi Santé also reported on its website that the residence has 26 suspected cases and 98 employees are currently withdrawn from work either because they have the virus or as a preventive measure.
The sisters are seeking more than $512,000 in damages “pursuant to the injuries sustained and the damages incurred as a result of mistreatments, wrongful medical treatments and nursing malpractice, negligence and breach of the late Ms. Maria Drimonakos’s rights related to the incidents which took place between April 2017 until her death” on July 29.
A spokesperson for Vigi Santé informed the Montreal Gazette that the company will not comment on a legal matter currently before a court.
Both women state in the lawsuit their lives have been deeply affected by what their mother lived through in the last two years of her life. In her claim, Antonia Andreadakis states it “caused her a great deal of stress in knowing that her late mother was not being properly looked after by the professionals to whom they entrusted their mother’s life and was disgusted and extremely devastated by the lack of care and attention for the (elderly people) who resided at Vigi (Mont Royal).”
The allegations contained in the lawsuit have yet to be proven in court.
The sisters allege that when they visited their mother they were witnesses to “unacceptable hygiene conditions” at the CHSLD, including “uncleaned sanitary installations and bathrooms, with cockroaches and other insects dead on the floor, strong smells of urine and feces, dirty bed sheets and pillows.”
The applicants also allege the CHSLD kept their mother in diapers even though they requested that she use the toilet facilities.
“As a result, (Drimonakos) spent long hours with unchanged diapers, which caused unbearable discomfort and smells for herself and her roommates, even during the meal times,” the Andreadakis sisters claim in the suit.
They also submitted their mother’s discharge summary sheet from when she was transferred from the Jewish General Hospital to Vigi Mont Royal on July 19, 2015. According to the lawsuit, “her overall conditions were stable.”
Her health took a turn for the worse after April 2017 and, according to the sisters: “their complaints and requests were not taken seriously by the medical and nursing staff.” They state they were unable to get an explanation as to how their mother suffered a partial dislocation of her right shoulder. They also argue a urinary tract infection was ignored for months before a test, requested by the sisters, revealed she had one.
In June 2019, a month before their mother died, the sisters were informed that a nurse at the CHSLD was fired for having given their mother insulin by accident. The insulin was intended for Drimonakos’s roommate, who suffered from diabetes.
Later that same month, a second nurse was fired after a vaginal suppository intended to treat an infection was inserted into the wrong orifice and left Drimonakos in “unbearable pain” for an entire night.