Ministry report on abuse case ‘watered down’
Daughter of patient told ‘you need to die’ fears for others in long-term care homes
Diana Pepin is visibly shaken as she watches the video she has seen numerous times.
In it, a personal support worker is preparing her severely disabled mother for bed in her room at the city-run Peter D. Clark long-term care home. The worker leans in and is heard saying: “Die, die ya bitch, you need to die now.”
That is just one of a series of disturbing video clips recorded over about a month last August and September on a camera the family installed. In them, among other things, Pepin’s 85-year-old mother is taunted by a support worker who says in a sing-song voice to “die, die, die” and asks: “Why it take you so long to die?”
Pepin’s mother, who is unable to walk, talk or feed herself, wept when her daughter told her the personal support workers involved in the series of verbal assaults no longer worked for the long-term care home and “they will never be able to do this to you again.”
But Pepin and her lawyer Daniel Nassrallah fear the lack of criminal charges in the case and a “watered down” report on the incidents by the Ministry of Health and LongTerm Care could put other vulnerable residents in institutional care at risk. This newspaper has previously written about the contents of one of the videos, but did not have access to all of them.
Pepin, who is a retired nurse, said she was “flabbergasted” when she learned last month that police, who had been investigating the incidents, would not lay criminal charges.
If government knows of a situation that puts the public at risk, telling people what’s going on seems like an obvious course of action. We are told when our cars are recalled or when there is bad cold meat in the stores. Restaurant safety inspections are conveniently available online.
So why is the Ontario government not giving the public the straight goods about the longterm care homes it deems medium- or high-risk because of repeated failures to meet its own standards? Protecting vulnerable seniors from substandard long-term care centres would seem like the government’s moral duty. Why is it not meeting its responsibility?
Here’s a theory. About 10 per cent of the province’s care homes are considered medium- or high-risk by the government. That’s more than 60 centres across the province. If the government told us which homes were troubled, people would be unwilling to go there.
That, in turn, would undermine the command-and-control system the government uses to dole out scarce long-term care beds.
Here’s how the system works. Seniors make a list of up to five homes and wait for a bed to become available. Given that there are 32,000 people waiting for the province’s 78,000 beds, this can be a long process.
When a bed is offered, a person must say yes or no within 24 hours. If the bed is refused, the senior’s application is closed and the person can’t reapply for 12 weeks. That puts them back at the bottom of the waiting list. That’s a rough and punitive way to treat seniors.
Here’s the dilemma the government faces. If a bed becomes open in a home that is on the government’s secret high-risk list, should it force a senior to go there anyway?
The Ontario government has made a decision to protect its own interests.
Apparently, the answer could be yes. There are only four homes in Ontario that the government has currently ordered to take no new admissions.
All homes in Ottawa are accepting new residents, although a Citizen investigation found widespread abuse and non-compliance. An examination of ministry reports dating back to 2012 uncovered 163 reported cases of resident abuse, 2,033 instances of non-compliance with provincial legislation and at least 17 deaths that led to the homes involved being cited for noncompliance.
One would almost think there would be a potential legal liability for a government that knowingly placed a senior in a home it deemed high-risk, but that’s not clear. If there is one thing government is good at, it’s insulating itself from the consequences of its actions.
As is too frequently the case, the Ontario government has made a decision to protect its own interests, not those of the public. If people knew a home was considered high-risk and refused to go there, that would leave scarce beds unfilled and back up an already slowmoving system.
Worse, imagine the optics of forcing a senior into a high-risk setting. And what about the people who already live there? Shouldn’t they know?
All those problems can be avoided simply by refusing to release the list. Sure, the government might take a butt-kicking for that, but it’s better than the 60 butt-kickings it would take in ridings across the province if the list got out.
The correct course of action would be for the government to identify the troubled homes and say that it’s not going to force anyone to go there until the problems are cleaned up.
Unfortunately, political considerations are overwhelming the need for public safety, and it’s not only the party in power that can fall prey to that trap.
The solution is to place the responsibility for inspection and reporting in the hands of an independent agency with a public-protection mandate and the power to bar new admissions to homes that fail to meet standards.
Politics should never trump the well-being of those who need our help the most.