Remember, patients in long-term care are people

This is a response to Lorraine Michael’s July 28th letter, “Let’s stop the warehousing of people in long-term care.”

What an excellent and much needed critical look at long-term care by a politician! It is also a very timely call to rethink our most prevalent model of care, such as Pleasantview Towers, which could be replicated in the future. A chilling thought! We must indeed stop warehousing people in silos, because we owe it to people needing care and we already have better models in Corner Brook, Bonavista and Clarenville, which have been given thumbs up by residents and their families.

I occasionally visit a friend in Pleasantview Towers who is severely disabled and has no family in this province. At every visit, inadequate levels of staffing are evident, also when looking at the many residents in the dayroom seemingly forlorn and lonely.

As well as the disturbing list of gross negligence Michael mentions, the lack of stimulation and human interaction concerns me most — the latter possibly due to frequent staff changes as well as understaffing.

When inquiring about the way patient care is organized, I was told patients are not “allocated” to a specific caregiver in order to foster a relationship, but it is more or less at random when considering the human resources of the day. The term “case management” was unknown.

It seems to me our politicians should be required to visit the facilities they have endorsed, and after an unannounced visit answer the following: can you approve more of the same?

Elke Molgaard St. John’s

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