Ombudsman says patients have a right to visitors

Ontario's Patient Ombudsman is urging the government to legislate “a right to visit” for patients in long-term care homes and public hospitals.

The recommendation is one of four in a special report from the Patient Ombudsman released Monday based on complaints from second and third waves of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It also recommends an acknowledgment that caregivers are an essential part of the system, better and clearer communications across the health-care sector and adequate support for health-care workers after the pandemic is over.

“What we really want to do is, as soon as we can, let the government and the health sector know as soon as we can just what it is we're hearing. So they can inform their planning for, what looks like Wave No. 4, and see if they can get ahead of it,” Patient Ombudsman Craig Thompson said Monday.

The importance of visits is acknowledged in the Patient's Bill of Rights contained in Ontario's Long-Term Care Act, Thompson said.

“But it doesn't go far enough and there's no recourse if someone has an issue with some of the restrictions,” he said. “If someone's in palliative care, those are special circumstances and the right to visit ought to be considered an absolute right.”

Established in 2015, the Patient Ombudsman handles complaints related to Ontario's health-care sector. This is its second report since the pandemic began. Between June 30, 2020 and April 30, 2021, the agency received about 3,000 complaints, of which 1,076 were directly tied to the pandemic.

Complaints about long-term care were down from the early “catastrophic” days of the first wave, Thompson said, but even so, two out of every three LTC complaints were pandemic related.

The report contains heartbreaking anecdotes about the toll COVID has had on seniors. In one case, a husband who had visited his wife daily in her LTC home was barred from seeing her at all.

“The family had video calls with the resident where her mother cried the entire call, believing she had been abandoned and not understanding the reasons that visits had stopped,” the report notes.

That isolation has had profound effects, Thompson said.

“We hear that so often from a family member or caregiver who gets in and finally has eyes on their loved one and they're seeing the decline that's taken place.”

Most of the complaints from hospitals involved restrictive visitation protocols or “confusing or inadequate communications.” Others complained of delayed treatments. In one case, a father complained that his adult daughter's chemotherapy for breast cancer that was initially delayed for two weeks ended up being postponed for two months.

The stress on health-care workers has been immense. One LTC worker described working in an understaffed home and constantly telling residents they would have to wait for help.

Thompson says it's essential health-care workers are supported.

“Those traumas will last, probably for that person's lifetime. When the pandemic is in our rearview mirror, we can't lose sight of what they've gone through. Those supports need to be in place now and afterwards for quite a while.”