‘Help Wanted’: Family says short-staffing in long-term care leaves residents waiting

Watching her mother in long-term care was one of the hardest things Dianne Morgan has ever had to deal with.

Among other incidents, toward the end of her life, Morgan’s mother developed extensive bed sores and suffered with them until she died.

Morgan believes those sores, along with all the other problems her parents had to live with in care homes, are the result of there not being enough staff in the homes.

“The staff did the best they could but they were always short-staffed. There was never a day in the 3 1/2 years that I was there that they weren’t short-staffed,” said Morgan.

Both her parents were in a long-term care home in Regina. Her father died at the start of 2018 and her mother passed away last summer.

Reading off a painful list, Morgan talked about what her parents went through.

She said her mother was given the wrong medication twice — it actually belonged to one of the other three women with whom she shared a room.

Her mother’s hearing aids were once accidentally thrown out.

“My sister and her husband literally had to go outside and climb in the big bin at the back and go through the garbage to find them,” Morgan recalled.

Morgan said one of her mother’s teeth was broken off at the gum, noting she never got an explanation for how it happened. Her mother’s dentures were thrown out twice. And her father’s catheter broke off inside of him and he had to be rushed to the hospital.

Morgan also talked about mealtimes. She said either she or another member of her family were usually there to feed her mother. Morgan said residents usually didn’t get their supper until around 5:30 p.m., but they started being brought to the dining room by 4 p.m.

“And they were sitting there, some of them slumped over asleep in their wheelchairs,” Morgan said. “There was, on occasion, a couple of the ladies that would actually sit there and cry because they’d been sitting there well over an hour and there was no supper.”

Morgan said she tried to talk to the staff about it.

“They said, well, they were short-staffed and they had to get everyone to the dining room, so therefore they had to start early,” she said.

Morgan said throughout the time her parents were living at the home, she and her siblings would try to talk to the employees or managers about what they were seeing. But Morgan said there might be a fix for a day or two and then it would all go back to normal.

“It just was never resolved,” she said.

She and her siblings discussed moving her parents, but Morgan said by then her mother’s condition was too deteriorated and the doctor didn’t advise it.

Morgan emphasized that most of the staff were good people who cared about their work, but there just wasn’t enough staff to get it all done.

That’s a sentiment found throughout comments in the recently released CEO Tour report from 2019. Each long-term care home in the province is visited and comments are written out and published in the report.

Many of the homes had some kind of comment about low staffing levels or that recruitment and retention of staff was an ongoing issue.

A comment for the Cupar & District Nursing Home, which was toured last July, said “scheduling is very challenging, particularly nights. They identified a need for additional nursing resources to support the needs of the residents.”

The writer of the report for the Goodwill Manor in Duck Lake, which was toured in October, copied down comments from some residents and their families:

“Are the staff rushed or are they rushing themselves?”

“Concerns that every item that is added to the staff ‘duties’ (i.e. answering the door) will make the staff even more overworked.”

Comments under the River Heights Lodge in North Battleford, which was toured in September, read that staff turnover results in poor consistency in care.

“Staff retention impacts directly on resident quality of life.”

Most of those reports didn’t give a reason for low staffing, but some mentioned challenges because the home is in a rural area, workers were getting burned out, or there was too much competition from other good employers in the area.

Morgan believes that the current guidelines aren’t enough and that the provincial government should implement minimum care standards with more teeth.  She also thinks more funding is needed from the government for these homes so they can meet those care standards and hire and keep an appropriate number of staff.

“I just think that it’s time that our government does something for our seniors so that they don’t have to be so disrespected and treated the way that they are in those homes. Because there’s just not enough people to provide proper care,” said Morgan.

Tomorrow, we hear from a worker in a long-term care home who talks about what it’s like to do the job with few to help, in Part 2 of the series “Help Wanted: Seniors’ Care in Saskatchewan.”

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to clarify the number of CEO reports which discuss staffing issues