NDP leader calls for long-term care inquiry
Citizen report shocked Horwath into urging action on troubled system
Problems in our long term care system are not isolated.
ANDREA HORWATH
Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath has called on the provincial government to launch a full-scale inquiry into problems that plague the long-term care system.
Horwath wrote a letter Monday to Health Minister Eric Hoskins, citing her shock and concern over revelations made in a Citizen investigation, to repeat her demand for a broad public inquiry into what ails the troubled system.
That four-month investigation examined a stack of provincial reports — more than 8,500 pages of them — generated by long-term care home inspectors.
It revealed that there have been 163 reported cases of physical, sexual and verbal abuse in Ottawa’s long-term care homes during the past five-and-a-half years — and that every long-term care facility in the city had been cited for improper care during that time. What’s more, it found that at least 17 residents have died since 2012 in incidents that led to the homes involved being cited for failing to comply with provincial regulations.
In her letter, Horwath said the investigation revealed the “shocking prevalence of abuse in Ottawa long-term care facilities.”
“The details in the article are heartbreaking,” she wrote, “with clear-cut cases of neglect, abuse and negligence found at every facility in the city. Worse yet, the ministry’s own numbers suggest the abuse has become more common since 2012.”
The investigation found that the annual number of reported abuse cases rose to 66 in 2016 from 12 in 2012.
Horwath called on the minister to expand the mandate of the recently established Wettlaufer Inquiry, created to examine how one nurse could kill eight people under her care at three different nursing homes in London and Woodstock.
Nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer, 50, pleaded guilty in June to using insulin to kill her victims; she attempted to kill six others. Her crime spree began in 2007 and didn’t end until she confessed to the murders last fall.
Horwath said the new revelations in the Citizen demonstrate that some of the systemic problems highlighted by the Wettlaufer case are widespread.
“I simply cannot believe that Ottawa is an outlier,” the NDP leader said.
“Problems in our long term care system are not isolated, individual issues, and we can no longer treat them as such. Ontario needs a province-wide, ‘find and fix’ inquiry into long-term care to get to the bottom of these systemic issues,” she wrote.