Don’t wait for a nursing home plan
The provincial government’s plan for Nova Scotians who are too feeble, old and sick to stay in their homes is taking shape – just wait.
Don’t wait for the plan. Wait is the plan. Not that the Liberal government wants Nova Scotians to hear that, at least not from them. It sounds callous, to some ears, heartless.
But what else are they going to do with the old, sick and imminently dying, except make them as comfortable as possible within defined budgetary limits, and wait?
Amid a resurgence of evidence that Nova Scotian nursing homes are understaffed to the point where patients are endangered – the evidence is always there; it erupts into the public every couple of years – the government says it is waiting for other evidence. That’s pretty much what it said a couple of years back, when there was a similar burst of attention on under-funded nursing homes.
A committee of the legislature was told last week that the provincial department of seniors is waiting for a new continuing care plan from the Department of Health and Wellness. It doesn’t matter that no such plan is in the works. Waiting is inevitable.
The committee and Nova Scotians may think they are waiting for a response to the problems that beset Nova Scotia’s nursing homes, or an answer for the 1,100-plus people on the perpetual wait-list for a bed in one of them.
But waiting is the response and the answer.
A dozen years ago, the province – then governed by Tories – produced a 10-year continuing care plan. The Liberals are not about to repeat that mistake.
That’s not to say the province isn’t doing all kinds of things in continuing care. It is. It’s steadily increasing what it calls “supports” that help people stay in their homes for as long as possible.
But once people can no longer stay in their own homes, there isn’t much left to do but wait. That’s what people in nursing homes do. Wait. They wait for lunch, wait for dinner, wait for their medication, wait for visitors and wait for the inevitable.
The province will try to make the wait comfortable, but it’s not going to spend a lot of money improving the experience. And that’s really what the debate is about. How much is the wait worth?
The Liberal government has decided other things are worth more. They won’t admit that, but their actions confirm it.
Those are decisions governments make, and if you disagree, there are ways to express that disagreement up to and including your vote.
For obvious reason, the province has no intention of writing down that waiting out 30 or more years of increasing demand on nursing homes is the plan. They won’t even say it out loud.
When asked about a new plan for continuing care, the department provided a response. Wait for it:
“In 2015, the department started looking into where we were at that time in terms of the (10-year) strategy and continuing care as a foundation piece for next steps. The work being done now encompasses all of continuing care – care in the community, home care and long-term care – and how to meet the current and future needs of our aging population. Initiatives are being implemented as we go in different areas, (mentions a few). We will continue to do that – announce as we go. All of this is part of the overall strategy to address quality of care, patient safety and funding needs.”
“Announce as we go,” is a communications strategy for a nonexistent long-term care strategy.
It is sad, unacceptable, possibly immoral that people in Nova Scotian nursing homes suffer or die early because limited resources result in substandard care. It is tragic? I don’t know.
In Texas few days ago, there was a hail of deadly bullets fired in an American school – the 22nd such horror in less than five months of 2018. Kids are dying waiting for a sane response to an insane reality. I know that’s tragic.