Dementia care and elder care advocates in Canada and around the world will tell you their input with respect to improving care for seniors is largely ignored. This is one of the main reasons neglect and abuse continue in many long-term care facilities. It’s also one of the reasons thousands of older adults died during the pandemic of 2020/21. This real life example illustrates how our voices are not heard.
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During the week of April 26, 2021, two separate reports, both of them “scathing,” described the long-time sorry state of affairs in long-term care (LTC) in Ontario.
The content of the reports was widely covered by the media, which is kind of surprising. Because it’s not news. The media is meant to report news. And the appalling state of long-term care in Canada is not news. It’s just the way it is, and the way it has been for decades.
The fact that LTC in Canada sucks is not news. At least not to Canadian elder care and dementia care advocates such as myself, or to many family members and care partners of LTC residents in Ontario, or across our country. Nor is it news to advocates, family members and care partners in Australia, the United Kingdom, or the United States.
We’ve all known about the shortcomings, the abuse, the neglect, and the atrocities “revealed” in these reports for a long time. In fact, we’ve been screaming about them at the top of our lungs for years, in some cases for decades. We are not shocked by the findings. Not at all. It’s just more of the same ole same ole.
When I came back to Canada from overseas in 2011 to care for my mother who lived with dementia, I knew less than nothing about providing such care. It was a steep learning curve. When she was relocated to a LTC facility in Quebec in the fall of 2012, I thought she was going to a place where people would care for her. That professionals who knew what they were doing would oversee her care. That she would be respected, not neglected.
I was wrong. Within a week, I threw all those misconceptions out the window and began advocating like crazy for my mom. I was unsuccessful.
In 2013, I initiated legal action to try to get control of her care from the sibling to whom she had entrusted it. In 2014, the facility’s Director of Nursing and its on-contract physician both lied in the court proceeding. The judge ruled against me. I visited my mother every day for the next two and half years. I witnessed her continued neglect and abuse. I started a blog. My visits were restricted as punishment. I documented everything.
Anyone with any common sense who spends time with a family member in most LTC facilities in Canada will quickly realize the system is broken. You would have to be deaf and blind not to. The proof is legion.
In October 2016, two months after my mother died, and almost four years before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote a post describing the reasons why neglect and abuse of elders with dementia may be the norm rather than the exception in long-term care facilities.
In January 2017, I spoke before a senate committee about the abuse my mother had experienced. The committee members listened, but it seems not to have made a difference. In November 2017, Quebec’s Minister of Health announced an initiative to reduce the use of antipsychotics in LTC. Too late for my mom; she had already been dead a year.
In September 2019, I submitted a twenty-page complaint to the Order of Nurses of Quebec regarding the conduct of the Director of Nursing of the facility in which my mother resided. It included an in-depth analysis of what had transpired as well as audio, video and photographic evidence that clearly showed the abuse and neglect. A year later I received a one-page whitewash in reply. I made a follow-up complaint to the Order’s Review Committee in December 2020. I haven’t received an answer to the follow-up. I have also complained to the College of Physicians and Surgeons about the physician’s conduct. No response.
In 2020, I tweaked my 2016 post slightly and re-blogged it under the title “it’s taken a pandemic and tens of thousands of deaths for people to get what long-term care advocates have known for decades: the system sucks.”
Both of these posts outlined the same basic issues it has taken an auditor general and reams of experts months to conclude. They are:
1 ) Ageism & stigma
2 ) Lack of awareness
3 ) Poor leadership
4 ) Lack of training/understanding
5 ) Low staff-to-resident ratios
6 ) Warehouse-like environments
7 ) Dis-incentivized workers
8 ) Uncaring cultures
9 ) Ineffective “policing”
10 ) The bottom line
I mean really. C’mon.
We’re not talking rocket science here. We don’t need reports. We need ACTION.
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