Former CEO of Perley-Rideau centre to review city-run nursing homes
A former chief executive of the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre will review Ottawa’s cityowned nursing homes and tell the municipal government where they went wrong, city manager Steve Kanellakos announced Tuesday.
Greg Fougère retired in 2013 after 17 years leading the facility, which expanded from a nursing home specializing in veterans to a “seniors’ village” with assistedliving apartments and programs based at the Perley-Rideau that serve people in their own homes.
His job is to help the city’s four municipal nursing homes recover from scandalous stories of resident abuse and neglect: a personal support worker who punched a disobedient man with dementia and pleaded guilty to assault; family members who say they’ve been barred from the homes after complaining about their loved ones’ treatment; a man left lying in his own blood after slipping out of his wheelchair in an incident a nurse hushed up.
At the end of September, after spending an entire summer reeling and trying to rebuild faith in their operation, Kanellakos and the city’s social-services manager Janice Burelle fired three more workers after one of them was caught on a hidden recorder asking a resident why it was taking her so long to die and two others heard it and kept it to themselves. That’s when Kanellakos and Burelle said they’d bring in an expert to go over their system from top to bottom, as soon as they could find someone suitable.
During Fougère’s stint at the Perley-Rideau, two personal-support workers were charged with assaulting residents and a third was charged with intimidating witnesses in the case.
Other staff reported the abuse, which resulted in jail time for at least one of the abusers.
“The scope of the review includes a thorough review of data, documents and files associated with the operations of the homes and of the incidents, as well as interviews with key stakeholders; an analysis of factors contributing to recent incidents; and, the identification of actionable measures, in the form of recommendations aimed at preventing abuse (physical, verbal, emotional and sexual) or the failure to report going forward,” Kanellakos told city councillors in a memo.
The same memo said the province’s Ministry of Health has approved specific plans the city submitted to the ministry explaining how it’ll deal with deficiencies ministry inspectors found in the way nurses supervise less-qualified staff, the way the homes keep and follow each resident’s care plan, the way they handle residents with dementia, and how they respond to claims of abuse.