Inquiry needed in nursing home murders

For murdering eight elderly nursing home patients and assaulting or trying to kill six other people, Elizabeth Wettlaufer is expected to be sentenced to life behind bars later this month.

But when the prison doors close behind the former nurse, nagging questions will remain open about how this disturbed, substance-addicted woman was allowed to kill and injure some of the most vulnerable Ontarians over a nine-year period.

The only way the public will get this information is if the Ontario government orders a public inquiry into Wettlaufer’s crime spree.

Yes, Ontario has a system for regulating nursing homes.

But the system might never have stopped this serial killer if she had not in September 2016 voluntarily confessed to staff at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, who then called police.

Yet alarms had been ringing loudly about this woman for years. Someone with power should have been listening. A full 30 months before Wettlauffer’s admission in Toronto, the College of Nurses of Ontario was informed she had been fired from Woodstock’s Caressant Care nursing home for a life-threatening “medication error.” Her termination letter said her behaviour was “placing residents at risk.”

That was in April 2014. The college of nurses told the nursing home the matter would remain confidential and that Caressant Care would not be told of any college investigation.

After that, Caressant Care had no way of knowing what action the college would take to deal with this dangerous nurse.

Nor would other potential employers be easily informed of Wettlaufer’s troubled history.

While the college of nurses posts records of the 160,000 nurses it governs on its website, Wettlaufer’s public record listed none of her failings until she confessed her crimes.

There’s no reason to think the Caressant Care management or the nursing college knew that by the time Wettlaufer was fired from the Woodstock home in the spring of 2014, she had killed seven residents with overdose injections of insulin.

But the system’s failure to deal with what it knew about her left Wettlaufer free to move on to London’s Meadow Park nursing home where, in August 2014, she killed a 75-year-old resident with an insulin overdose.

After she resigned from that home to be treated for alcohol and drug abuse, Wettlauffer tried to kill again at a nursing home in Paris that had hired her.

There is so much more the public needs to know about her destructive career.

The college of nurses is responsible for licensing and disciplining the province’s nurses. Why didn’t the college take action against her?

Why didn’t it suspend her licence or prevent her from administering medication without more training?

Then, there are the employers who hired her after Caressant Care. Did they exercise due diligence?

And what about the Ontario government? In 2015, Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk criticized the government for backlogged complaints and inspection delays at nursing homes that put residents at risk. Are the Liberals living up to their responsibilities? The Wynne government should answer these questions by ordering a public inquiry.