Testimonies of long-term care workers paint dreadful picture
The words of hundreds of nurses, orderlies, residents and caregivers who saw the inside of long-term care homes stricken with COVID-19 in the spring were compiled into a report released Thursday by Quebec's ombudsperson.
Their testimonies, while anonymous, paint a devastating picture of how the centres were blindsided by the virus and how staff struggled to cope.
This is what they said.
STAFFING SHORTAGES
“I remember a nursing assistant calling for help. He had just finished a 12-hour night shift, he was alone in the hot zone, no orderly, no doctor.”
“Some residents did not have access to comprehensive hygiene care ( bath, shower) or hair washing for several weeks. From early to mid-april there was a severe lack of staff. I remember a few days when I even found myself alone with an attendant for a unit of 50 residents.
Of course, we couldn't help everyone eat. Residents remained in bed all day, unclothed, sometimes only in incontinence panties without any other clothing. No movement — people all stayed in their beds. We didn't have time to turn them in bed to avoid sores.”
“At one point, massive screening was ordered for users and all staff, including kitchen staff, managers, caregivers. After obtaining the result, we were missing half of the staff.”
LACK OF EQUIPMENT
“I arrived at the CHSLD on April 19. At the clinical team meeting, I learned that there were 200 gowns left in the reserves when we should normally have been using 1,800 per day.”
“We lacked medical equipment such as infusion pumps, oxygen concentrators and other instruments that are not normally used in CHSLDS. Because of the lack of equipment, we sometimes had to choose between two patients in respiratory distress, to determine to whom we were going to apply the protocol of care. It was unsustainable. I had to do therapy because of this.”
LACK OF TRAINING AND PREPARATION
“There were already several cases present in the building, and staff members were still sharing the employee room without distancing. I talked to my manager about it and he said it wasn't a big deal. Similarly, I complained that employees were going from floor to floor, between cold zones and hot zones. It continued and the infection spread throughout the whole building.”
“There was no manager on site and no clear guidelines. Orderlies were required to determine the residents for whom the oxygen equipment would be used.”
“When I arrived at the CHSLD care unit, I was assigned the task of patient attendant. I immediately saw that the situation was much worse than the one at the CHSLD where I came from. Users in respiratory distress, an hour or two before their death, should have been relieved with morphine, but the nursing staff had not been trained to administer end-of-life care. They were limited to giving analgesics. No palliative care areas were developed.”
DEHUMANIZATION OF RESIDENTS
“The lack of telephones and tablets on the floors to be able to communicate with our loved one before it was too late was absolutely heartbreaking. We couldn't even talk to him once the fever broke out, let alone say goodbye. We can only imagine the distress he felt, and we take comfort in knowing that one of the people who was taking care of him regularly was able to be with him at the very end.”
“The rules on sanitary measures were dictated continuously. `Go to your room, it is forbidden to go out, you will be tied down.' These regularly repeated rules ended up lowering morale and angering us, as we were told, `I don't have time to get your hot water.' ”