Women’s shelter residents moved to hotel
Seven Indigenous women who had been staying at the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal have been put up in a hotel for two weeks after the coronavirus infected seven members of the shelter’s staff.
The shelter, which provides support for First Nations, Inuit and Métis women and their children, closed May 14.
On Wednesday, a cleaning crew is to begin decontaminating the shelter, which is on four floors, so residents can return May 28, said Nakuset, the shelter’s executive director. The local health authority is covering the cost of the cleaning and the hotel rooms.
But Nakuset said she’s disappointed with the way the CIUSSS Centre-sud de l’île-de-montréal and the Montreal public health department have responded to requests for help throughout the pandemic.
She said when the virus started spreading in Montreal in March, the shelter had to ask the community to donate masks because the CIUSSS didn’t send any.
The CIUSSS also refused to test the women after the first staff member became ill May 4, Nakuset said in an interview.
As more and more staff members became ill, she feared she would have to temporarily close the shelter.
On May 14, Nakuset said a CIUSSS employee told her he would try to send more staff to the shelter and have it cleaned so the women could remain there. If staff couldn’t be found, he said he would try to place the women in a hotel temporarily, she said.
But a few hours later, he called back to say that he had spoken to the Montreal public health department and that a hotel was not an option.
Nakuset said she was told the women were to remain in the shelter, and she was to ask staff who were feeling better to return to work.
“How could they be better served at the shelter when they haven’t been tested and we have no staff ?” she asked.
“He also said we didn’t need any kind of specialized cleaner; that we could use soap and water.”
It was only after the intervention of a social worker, who was with Nakuset when she took the call from the CIUSSS employee, that the women were moved into a hotel.
“I put him on speaker phone and the social worker contradicted everything he said,” Nakuset recalled.
The social worker called her supervisor at the CIUSSS, who arranged for the women to be tested at Hôtel-dieu Hospital and then moved to a hotel.
The seven staff members are recovering at home, and the shelter is to reopen May 28, she said.
CIUSSS spokesperson Julie Grenier said officials meet weekly with representatives of First Nations groups, and social workers had been assigned to work in Cabot Square to support them.
With ongoing community spread in Montreal, public health officials were reluctant to move residents from one shelter to another, Grenier said.
However, once it became clear that staff members were sick and management was anxious about not being able to provide services, the residents were moved.
“When there is an outbreak, everyone panics — we are all anxious,” Grenier said. “We know they were worried about the residents, so we stepped in to give them a breather.”