Care centre staff need support too

Re: Long-term care report details ‘emotional abuse’, May 2

Reading stories about emotional and physical abuse against elderly people in long-term care homes really confuses and upsets me.

It always makes me think about my own grandmother, who is living the last years of her life surrounded by family and loved ones.

She lives in Europe, in a small country where the norm is to care for your aging parents.

Long-term care homes are very rare and even people with serious illnesses, such as dementia, are often cared for by loved ones and not the health-care system.

In Canada, it is the norm for aging parents to be placed in long-term care homes or retirement homes.

Taking care of aging parents is not easy and deciding to send them to a facility means placing your trust in the people who work there to treat them as you would, care for them as you would and respect them as you would.

When my friends say they want to work in the healthcare system, they say it is because they want to make a positive difference in the lives of others.

In order to ensure that our parents and grandparents receive the care they deserve, we need to make sure we are providing a working environment that also takes care of staff.

The health-care sector is overworked, employees are constantly placed in highstress situations, and they are not provided enough time to deal with the emotional and physical strains of their jobs.

How can workers care for others when they are not being cared for themselves? Shpetim Berisha, Ottawa