Make long-term care a key election issue, experts urge Panel advises voters to ask about nursing homes and related issues
It’s time to stop focusing all our municipal election thoughts on development and transportation and make candidates talk about long-term care, health experts say.
A panel at the McNabb Community Centre on Monday evening advised voters to ask about nursing homes and other issues facing the elderly.
Nursing homes have a lot at stake this fall, said Susan Braedley, who teaches at Carleton University and studies nursing homes.
“First of all, Ottawa is fortunate in that we have four nursing homes that are opened by the municipality. We have an opportunity to really consider what kind of care we feel our seniors deserve and what care we can provide. That is very much on the municipal scene,” she said.
As well, the city offers many services to seniors, from library space to supporting transportation for seniors, she said. All these require municipal leadership and decisions.
The city had a recent report by Greg Fougère, a long-term care expert it hired to review its four nursing homes. He found evidence of “emotional abuse” at each facility. This followed a series of reports in this newspaper about elderly and helpless people who had been beaten and tormented by nursing home staff, actions that were sometimes recorded by patients’ families on video.
“The city did take up one of (his) recommendations and hired 35 new support workers,” Braedley said. “But I would be very interested in asking our candidates if they are familiar with the Fougère report and what recommendations they feel the city should move on next.”
For example, Fougère recommended better support for human resources, plus training.
“We haven’t seen anything yet from the city on those issues. Perhaps something is going on and we haven’t heard about it, but those are certainly things to be asking about," Braedley said.
“I want you to ask the candidates if they are prepared to allocate funds” to put more of Fougère’s recommendations into action," she told her audience. She said support must go beyond say it was ”a nice idea."
Violence is common in Canadian nursing homes and is often directed at staff, Trent University researcher Albert Banerjee said.
He has studied Canadian and Scandinavian nursing homes and found that violence is far more common in Canada. He believes one reason is that Canadian nursing homes are relatively understaffed, so workers are always having to rush to get basic tasks done.
This contributes to agitation among residents, Banerjee said. “We can’t separate the conditions of work from the conditions of care in nursing homes.”
People are often older, more frail and sicker when they enter nursing homes today than new residents were a decade ago, Braedley said. While they need extra help, rules force staff to spend more time documenting what they do and dealing with surveillance and inspections, which leaves less time for helping residents.
Other issues often drown out long-term care during municipal elections, Braedley added. “But … more and more of our population are over 60, or over 65, and we’re looking at that to increase. We need to be thinking about this a little bit differently.
“We are tremendously afraid of getting old and tremendously afraid of death and so we are ageist. It makes it particularly hard for people to talk about” issues surrounding long-term care.
The event was sponsored by the Ottawa Health Coalition.