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How many showers a week does Christy Clark take?
That may sound like a very odd question, but there is a
reason.
I would imagine, even hope, that Christy takes a
shower every day. However, the vast majority of elderly people in the
province of B.C. in care are given one bath or shower a week. One per
week. And many of these people, who are given one opportunity a week to
have a shower, are also incontinent.
There are many inadequacies in our medical system, but none so
glaring and horrible as the treatment of the elderly in the province of B.C.
Let me tell you the story of one person, and tell me your
stories.
Maybe together we can make a difference.
For the past thirteen years, I've ridden the rollercoast of
"senior care" in the province of B.C., on behalf of my mother.
We've used "in home care services" in an effort to keep her
at home.
Did you know that an "hour" of in home care is actually
40 minutes? Travel time is included in the hour.
I can't even remember the number of times that my mother's "home care" worker
simply didn't show up. I would get a call at work from my mother, who
depended on these workers to get her meals and help her wash and dress.
Either I had to leave work and come home to look after her, an hour away, or she
had to wait for the next care worker to come.
If I phoned the "society" that ran these services, they would simply say "oops".
There was no consistency in the workers that arrived. Much of their forty
minutes would be spent simply trying to figure out where things were located.
Many of them had a very poor grasp of English, which made it extremely difficult
for my mother to understand them. She was elderly, with very poor hearing.
How much were they charging for these services? The worker was paid about $17 an
hour. The society charged back to the government over $33 per hour.
As the provincial government cut back services further and further, this 91 year
old woman with a walker was told that her care aids could no longer do so much
as sweep her floor. She was only entitled to one bath a week, despite
being incontinent. I fought constantly with the person who was "assessing" her
as to how many hours of home care she was entitled to. When the assessor
came in one day and found water in the kitchen sink, she asked who had put the
water in the sink. My mother said she had done it. The assessor removed
one hour of home care, because my mother could obviously wash her own dishes.
Really? How petty.
We've used "hospital services" when she fell and broke her
hip.
My mother laid in a hospital waiting for hip replacement
surgery for ELEVEN DAYS. Every day there was a new and different excuse
for the delays. Finally I contacted two MLA's via email, and suddenly a
surgeon was located. Another health care professional told me it was "a
miracle" that my 91 year old mother hadn't simply died of pneumonia from lying
on her back so long.
The nurses were largely indifferent and not helpful - they made sure to let you
know what an imposition it was when you asked them a question. When my
mother was left alone in her room and she tipped over in her wheelchair, pulling
the bedside table down on top of her, the nursing staff "forgot" to tell me -
even though they brought in a doctor and sent her for an x-ray to see if she had
rebroken her hip. My mother kept telling me that she had fallen and broken
her hip that day, and I dismissed it as the ravings of a sick woman. Only later
did I realize that she was telling me what had happened to her that day.
I requested a meeting with the director of the hospital and the head of
emergency care. The reason? Even though they knew she had fallen before she went
into the hospital, no one ever did a physical or xrayed her hip for the first
three days she was in the hospital - therefore they didn't find out she had a
broken hip. They were even getting her up to use a commode - at 91, on a
broken hip before a nurse realized there was something wrong. What kind of
care is this? And what would have happened to her that could have been WORSE
than this if she didn't have me as an advocate for her?
In the end, she was so ill with diarrhea and vomiting that I took her out of the
hospital, fearing that the bugs there were going to kill her. After three days
of probiotics, her diarrhea was gone. For the next eight weeks, I spent
twenty four hours a day looking after her in her own home, until i was
completely exhausted and demoralized. What was I offered for respite care?
Two weeks out of the year, I could put her in a care home - the other fifty
weeks of the year, I would be her full time caregiver twenty four hours a day,
seven days a week, without any compensation. How could I earn a living?
We've used "extended care homes" when she lost mobility and
could no longer be cared for at home.
The care attendants were almost uniformly wonderful, and so
much more caring than the hospital nursing staff. However, they were
totally overworked and understaffed. At one point, one of the people hired
to provide activities was "cut", leaving even less time available to provide an
outlet for these people. As the months passed and my mother went downhill,
she was moved from the relatively comfortable "normal" floor to the "dementia"
floor. This was far more clinical and less homelike than the previous area.
Here she had her possessions stolen from her room over and
over by other residents. One male resident came into her room and urinated
all over her bed rest cushion where it sat in a chair beside her bed. Her
clothes were taken by other residents and not returned. One woman would come in
and rummage through my mother's closet even when I was sitting with her. When
she took other resident's clothes, she would put them on and scream in rage if
the care attendants tried to get her to change. My mother's hearing aids were
left in the pocket of her pants and "accidentally" put through the wash - a
$1500 loss.
They removed her call button because "they don't have call buttons on that floor
- the residents would constantly be giving false calls". So if my mother
was in bed and needed something, she was at the far end of the hall from the
nursing station with no way to contact them, and there were no cameras in the
hallway to monitor anything going on in that area. She begged me day after
day to stay with her all night, because she said "men were coming in and lying
down in bed with her." I reported this to the staff, who assured me this
wasn't the case. Even if it was, how could my mother call for help,
without a call button.
During "leisure" times, residents were stacked into a small lounge. There
was a TV in the lounge but it was located where very few of the residents could
see it, up on a wall. It's very doubtful if any of them could hear it as
most of them had very limited hearing and the sound was not turned up.
However, even this was better than the times that I arrived to find my mother
sitting in a wheelchair with many others, stacked up along the wall of the
opposite hallway, sitting in a long line, left there. She couldn't move
herself anywhere in her wheelchair, so she was just left there, sitting for as
long as they left her.
How tragic for these people. Each of them had lives, and careers,
families, paid taxes and helped build this province. And this is what they
were left to.
Then they decided that my mother needed "antipsychotic" drugs. I looked
them up on the internet and was horrified. The manufacturers of these
drugs has a big black box on each of them, which says very plainly "These drugs
are not safe for use in seniors and may cause sudden death". Did you know
that 60% of seniors in care are on these drugs? Why? Because there is inadequate
staff to properly care for these people unless they are drugged. I refused
them for my mother, and was given the veiled threat that I might "have to move
her" if I wouldn't let them give her the drugs. I still refused and the
staff let it drop, but not before I had sent a letter to Dr. Nigel Murray, CEO
of Fraser Health, and to the Minister of Health. Eventually I received a
reply from the Ministry, specifically from the Pharmaceutical branch, which said
that the Ministry was "concerned" over the increased use of these drugs in
seniors.
One doctor will look after as many as sixty seniors in a care home. In
most cases, these doctors do not examine each patient individually. They
simply look at the patients' charts and decide what to prescribe next.
And how much does this cost the patient? If you're in a care
home in B.C., they will take all but $200 of your pension to pay for this great
"care", and you keep the other $200 for "personal needs". Sounds fair, right?
Not really. The cost of your care in these homes DOESN'T INCLUDE YOUR
PRESCRIPTION MEDICATION which is supplied by - you guessed it - a provincial
government pharmacy. My mother paid up to $80 a month for these drugs.
And all those activities that they do in the care home? Those aren't free
either, nor are they included as part of the "care". No, for every
activity that my mother participated in, there was a charge - several dollars
for each patient whenever a musician dropped by - several dollars for gardening
club, when she could still do that, several dollars for every outing, when she
was still able to do those. All these charges came from the "comfort fund"
where I deposited several hundred dollars from time to time. Need a box of
kleenex? It comes out of the comfort fund - it is not supplied by the care home.
Add to that the cost of having a telephone and cablevision in her room, and she
far exceeded the amount of her pension every month. The system is designed
to suck the senior dry, and get all their savings before they die. How
sad.
The inadequacies of each of those systems were horrific,
and exposed major holes in the care of seniors in the province of B.C.
This is not the way I wanted my mother to be treated.
However, as lacking as each of these safety nets was for my
parent, there are horror stories from others, at every level of care, that are
go far beyond my wildest imaginings.
Some examples:
A senior left in wet diapers for so long that his penis became
infected, and had to be surgically removed.
A senior in care, whose child was told - "you choose - we can
take her to the washroom or feed her. Choose one"
I attended a meeting that is designed to shape the office
of a "senior advocate" for the province of B.C. An interesting concept and
I suggested that it be an arms length agency, such as the B.C. Consumer
Protection Agency. Hopefully there will be a better future ahead for the
enormous number of seniors on the horizon.
Contact Information
poodlepower1@gmail.com
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