Halifax law firm Wagner & Associates is taking “a serious look” at a potential class-action lawsuit with respect to allegations of negligence in Nova Scotia nursing homes.
“Certainly we have seen a spike and have been receiving frequent calls and emails about a lack of resources, as well as complaints of abuse and neglect in long-term care homes,” said Maddy Carter, a lawyer who handles class actions at Wagner’s. She declined to estimate how many queries the firm has fielded.
Carter confirms that while the firm has received complaints about homes owned by Shannex, it has also received complaints about care at other homes. The firm is continuing to gather information before making any decision to narrow the target of a possible lawsuit. In Ontario, a class action alleging negligence was filed this spring by families of residents in facilities owned by a company called Extendicare.
Meanwhile, leaders from three advocacy groupsfrom different areas of the province are teaming up to demand the government provide better long-term care for senior citizens. Halifax-based Advocates for the Care of the Elderly (ACE), the North Shore Seniors Association based in Tatamagouche, and Families for Quality Eldercare in Cape Breton held their first meeting this week to discuss strategy. Their goals include more nursing home beds and more staff with appropriate training to care for residents.
“The government hasn’t addressed it,” said Bob Silverstein, co-founder of Families for Quality
Eldercare. “Our group has only been going for six weeks but we can see more people are starting to come forward. With that involvement, we might be able to make the government understand there is a crisis which is only going to get much worse.”
The Cape Breton group was started by Bob and Norma Silverstein after Norma’s father, 93-year-old John Ferguson, passed away last October. He was a resident of the Shannex-owned Harbourstone Enhanced Care facility in Sydney and was admitted to the ER after a bedsore (also known as a pressure ulcer) turned septic. Norma Silverstein says they’ve been contacted by more than 50 people so far.
Shannex has responded to several recent published accounts of alleged neglect with a letter dated May 25 to families, staff, and the media. It states: “Recent reports from family members concerned about care are matters we take very seriously; our culture is one that always strives to learn from experience so that we can do better. As a result, we have launched a Quality Improvement Plan in wound prevention and management which includes a number of activities that focus on supporting our staff and improving communication with residents and families.”
Paul Jenkinson attended the meeting on behalf of the 30 members of the North Shore Seniors’Association. The retired social worker lives in the area north of Truro along the NorthumberlandStrait. He says people in his area are very satisfied with the care provided at Willow Lodge in Tatamagouche. The 61-bed nursing home is modelled on the Eden Alternative, which allowsresidents some control over daily decisions and incorporates pets, gardens, and visits fromvolunteers and children. The non-profit has been run by a local board since 1969. Jenkinson says the problem his group has identified is there aren’t enough Willow Lodges and not enough beds for people too frail to rely on home care.
Jenkinson says seniors tell him they feel abandoned, that they believe “the current government is simply waiting for them to die at home or in hospital rather than create new long-term care beds.”
Lenore Zann, MLA for Truro-Bible Hill-Millbrook, released numbers in March obtained by the NDP through a Freedom of Information request. They revealed that over the last five years, 23 per cent of the people waiting for placement in a nursing home died in hospital. The number of deaths in the northern zone is higher than the provincial average of 15 per cent. The daily cost of a hospital bed is also higher than the cost of a long-term care bed — approximately five times higher, according to estimates from the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
The McNeil government has not allocated any money for more nursing home beds in five years. Instead, it has invested heavily in home-care programs to keep people in their residences. Still, the wait for long-term care beds hovers around 1,000 people, and with more baby boomers growing older, the demand for beds is likely to double within the next 10 years.
Gary MacLeod started ACE a dozen years ago, after his mother spent 18 months in the VG waiting for a nursing home bed and then had a sink fall on her head while she was a resident in a rundown nursing home. He agrees with Paul Jenkinson that this week’s coming together of three groups represents a significant synergy in the fight to engage politicians.
“When you have bedsores and you have people dying from preventable medical situations and the government remains in a bureaucratic snooze saying, ‘Wait, wait, there’s time’ — for those people, there isn’t time,” argues Jenkinson, from North Shore Seniors. “If people are waiting for beds, the solution is a bed. If people are waiting to be cared for, the solution is a reasonable level of staffing. You could study it forever.”
The Silversteins have filed a complaint under the province’s Protection of Persons in Care Act about the care Norma’s father received. Seven months later, they’ve been told their complaint is still being investigated by a staffer employed by the Department of Health’s enforcement branch. Both the Silversteins and members of ACE say complaints regarding nursing homes should be investigated by an arms-length agency outside government. In Ontario, the government created Health Quality Ontario to look into complaints and to monitor health indicators such as falls and pressure ulcers before making regular reports to the public.
“People have been afraid to come forward and join forces with those who want to make changes in the care older people receive,” said Norma Silverstein.
“Residents want to be treated like human beings and not like old pillows waiting to be thrown out.”
