Luck prevented disaster in nursing homes
We haven’t had COVID-19 outbreaks in Saskatchewan nursing homes like we’ve seen in Quebec, Ontario and now New Brunswick for the same reason we generally haven’t had as big a problem.
Saskatchewan’s greatest ally during this pandemic crisis continues to be our sparse population and relative isolation.
Sure, we can pat ourselves on the back for taking the situation seriously early (although Premier Scott Moe’s government was contemplating an election until the first identified case), but the reality boils down to this:
We’ve been lucky that problems we’ve long ignored in long-term care homes haven’t exploded into a complete disaster during this pandemic.
The latest political skirmish over long-term care started last week, when Moe was asked during a COVID-19 briefing on Wednesday whether he was worried about a similar outbreak in Saskatchewan (82 per cent of Canadians who’ve died of COVID -19 lived in nursing homes) and what has happened to the chief executive officer tour reports on nursing home concerns instituted under former health minister Dustin Duncan prior to the 2016 provincial election.
Moe said provincial government “guidelines” and a policy of workers sticking to one home have contributed mightily to stopping any potential spread. He also said CEO tours and reports are still happening, albeit slightly differently now that we have just one provincewide Saskatchewan Health Authority.
The premier’s answer was initially ignored by media outlets (important to note), although the Leader-post’s Arthur White-crummey did a related story on Friday about the plight of a Radville family whose 89-year-old deceased mother was caught in the shuffle partly caused by the SHA’S closure of rural emergency facilities in this rural community and 11 others.
However, the NDP were quick to seize on the issue, calling for the release of the CEO tours report and setting off a war of words between the premier and the Opposition in which Moe accused the NDP of insulting hard-working health-care workers and NDP Leader
Ryan Meili said Moe was lying.
New Democrat criticism did spur Moe’s communications office to release the tour report at 3:30 p.m. on Friday — an irritating tactic all governments have long engaged in when they want to bury bad news, causing indignation from media and government opponents and critics.
But governments only do this because it works; for this, media outlets bear their share of the blame. We could have demanded the report earlier in the week, or, frankly, months ago.
As it turned out, most outlets didn’t report on
Friday anyway — one notable exception being Global News Regina TV host and reporter Colton Praill, who did a solid job detailing the report on Friday on his own Twitter feed.
Among the more salient points highlighted by Praill: the lack of private rooms (only 25 per cent at Extendicare Special Care in Saskatoon); one bathroom shared by 16 residents at Porteous Lodge in Saskatoon; a lack of ambulance service in Moe’s hometown of Shellbrook; a plethora of problems at the ever-troubled Regina Pioneer Village related to ventilation and the lack of air conditioning; staff are undertrained and “people may be taking antipsychotics without reason.”
The report lacked much of the drama in past Saskatchewan reports (which discourages media coverage more than anything).
But even without the drama and even with whatever sanitization there might have been by the mid-level administrators who wrote and gathered the information, it still painted a picture of largely overworked staff suffering from a lack of training — largely due to turnover in an occupation that is notoriously underpaid. In short, these are the same problems identified by the military members sent in to help with the COVID-19 problems in Quebec and Ontario longterm care homes.
While we sporadically bicker over the issue, it’s not being addressed.
Fixing problems requires more than new buildings — some of which this Sask. Party government has provided. It will require standards and massive public investment in personnel, and it’s worth noting the NDP made no commitment to either in its last campaign in 2016.
We all have to do better. Mandryk is political columnist for the Regina Leader-post and Saskatoon Starphoenix.