Restorative care, but at what human cost?
Vulnerable seniors are pawns in a shell game of shuffling beds
On Monday, my family was forced to choose the poison with which to kill our 88-year-old mother.
I’m referring to the untenable choice we’ve been forced to make so that Alberta Health Services and Health Minister Stephen Mandel can push forward its restorative care program.
A few weeks ago, Mandel announced the government would devote 311 beds in Edmonton and Calgary to restorative care, which is supposed to help elderly patients recover from falls and other injuries so that they can return home rather than enter long-term care.
On the surface, this may seem laudable. The program is supposed to relieve pressure on hospitals because of the number of senior patients in treatment, many waiting to be placed in long-term care facilities, or more often than not, die while waiting for that placement.
These are not 311 new beds — certainly not in the longterm care facility where our mother has been a resident for the past six years. To achieve this target, the very people who already occupy those beds are being displaced.
So if there are no new beds, where are these displaced long-term patients supposed to go?
When I received the phone call from my mom’s facility, I was immediately asked if there was another facility where we’d like her to go. Which mythical long-term care facility might that be?
Our mother does not respond well to change.
After the last room move, this delicate woman was sick for two months from the stress and ended up in hospital.
She was already in our facility of choice, so moving her elsewhere is out of the question.
In recent weeks, we’ve watched as residents in her wing have been moved — some into rooms in a different wing after other residents there have died; others upstairs into the dementia unit. So now precious beds for dementia patients are being taken away to accommodate other residents who should not even be in that unit in the first place.
The facility where our mother resides is supposed to provide 11 beds for restorative care. Administration had managed to displace enough people to offer up nine beds. By Monday, it was down to the last two, both in private rooms and difficult to place — a gentleman who has called the facility home for more than a decade after suffering from a stroke, and our mother.
At a meeting with the care manager, we were told a private room had come available, but it was not in the wing where other longterm care residents had been moved. It was in the dementia unit.
By the end of a stressful morning of discussions with the manager, among family and a consultation with our mother’s doctor, it was clear that if we didn’t take this room, then regardless of our wishes and what was in the best interest of our mother’s physical and mental health, AHS would likely transfer her elsewhere. Whatever it took, AHS would get those 11 beds, at least four of which came at the expense of dementia patients.
Like a captive sentenced to death and offered the choice of beheading, hanging or electrocution, the outcome for my mother is still the same: She’s still going to move, and it will be devastating. We’ve been down this road all too often before.
The forced move has not been easy for the other residents either. I’m told one elderly woman keeps returning to her old room whenever she needs to use the bathroom. Disorientation is a common thread.
At my mom’s facility, the introduction of restorative care was carried out with much secrecy. It’s also been rushed, chaotic, highly disruptive to residents, their families and staff. I’ve been informed that staff found out about the addition of the restorative care program not from their administration, but through a news story.
This debacle demonstrates a profound lack of caring, compassion and common sense, as well as a total disregard for the well-being of elderly, vulnerable patients who have been displaced. To Mandel and AHS, these people are only numbers; pawns in a shell game of shuffling beds. And to what end?
Certainly this has not resulted in the creation of new beds. Rather, the result is a loss of beds and the heartless displacement of seniors in need of long-term care and dementia care. There is a human cost. Shame on you, Stephen Mandel and the Alberta government. Cheryl Croucher is an Edmonton broadcast journalist working in digital, radio and print media.