A health-care system failure
On the very first day of the public inquiry into the killings by nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer we learned that serious red flags were raised about her right at the beginning of her nursing career.
Wettlaufer was fired within months of starting work at the Geraldton District Hospital in northwestern Ontario for stealing tranquilizers and using them herself. That was way back in 1995. And it was covered up. That was the beginning of a pattern that continued throughout her terrible and deadly career. Individuals and organizations that should have been dedicated to protecting the vulnerable within their care acted instead to protect Wettlaufer and themselves.
That’s why she was able to continue working until 2016 in multiple nursing jobs where she murdered eight elderly patients by injecting them with overdoses of insulin, and tried to kill others.
When Wettlaufer was finally fired from the Caressant Care nursing home in Woodstock after seven troubled years, the Ontario Nurses’ Association and management helped her move on to a new job with a clean record.
She went off to Meadow Park in London — where she killed her eighth nursing home resident — with a glowing letter of reference. They even gave her $2,000 in severance.
They may not have known that she had murdered seven patients while working at Caressant. But they sure knew this was a deeply troubled nurse with a terrible record of patient care and medication errors.
That Caressant and her union did nothing then is what let her go on to kill 75-year-old Arpad Horvath. And that they did nothing earlier in her career is what let her kill seven patients in her time at Caressant.
It’s an utterly inexcusable failure of the heath-care system. And that’s just day one of an inquiry scheduled for nine weeks. There’s still such more to learn.
Who knew and what forces — from the fears of costly union grievances to privacy concerns and the nursing shortage in this sector — made them take so little action?
Why did the coroner’s office not investigate a death that an emergency room doctor said was suspicious? And why on earth did the College of Nurses of Ontario not do more to protect the public?
On Tuesday, Caressant’s lawyer said Wettlaufer’s actions betrayed her co-workers. The far bigger betrayal belongs to Caressant and the other employers and associations who utterly betrayed the trust that patients and their families placed in them.
Acourt has already ruled on Wettlaufer’s guilt and sentenced her to life in prison for her crimes. This inquiry isn’t about what she did so much as it is about what others did or, tragically as we’re discovering, did not do.
That’s where the necessary solutions to fix the system are to be found.
Individuals and organizations that should have been protecting the vulnerable within their care acted instead to protect themselves