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The Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN) is calling for a public inquiry into the deadly COVID outbreak at the Parkside Extendicare long-term care home in Regina.
Since the outbreak was declared in late November, 20 residents with COVID have died. As of Wednesday, the care home has 77 positive cases among residents and another 77 cases among staff.
SUN president Tracy Zambory said the families of these residents deserve answers and it needs to be done in a public forum.
“We need to find out how things went so incredibly wrong at Parkside Extendicare. How it is that we’ve got so many residents that have passed (and) so many staff that are ill?” said Zambory.
She said the pandemic shouldn’t have been a surprise to Extendicare Canada and accused the company of putting profits before people.
“They’ve been fighting this outbreak since Nov. 20, yet the conditions have gotten increasingly more chaotic, more abysmal, more filthy, to the point now that the Saskatchewan Health Authority has to go into a co-agreement with them,” said Zambory.
Zambory said staff are describing cluttered disarray, broken equipment and unkempt rooms with garbage and clothing strewn all over the floors.
In some situations, she said residents who test positive for COVID are kept in the same room, separated from the negative patients by only a curtain. Staff have been working with both positive and negative residents wearing the same personal protective equipment (PPE) and only received N95 masks at the care home on Sunday night, according to Zambory.
“This kind of abomination would not happen in the publicly funded, publicly administered long-term care system in this province,” she said.
In early December, off-duty members of the Regina fire department started to help do everything from cleaning to medical monitoring. The Saskatchewan Health Authority has also stepped in to co-manage the day-to-day operations at the home.
Zambory said we need to take a hard look at for-profit long-term care in Saskatchewan and across the country to ensure they live up to national standards.
980 CJME reached out to Extendicare for comment, but hadn’t received a response by the time of publication.
From the SHA
On Thursday afternoon, the health authority’s CEO, Scott Livingstone, called the outbreak at Parkside the single-biggest we’d had in the province in long-term care.
He said, as of Wednesday at 4 p.m. there had been 138 residents and 82 staff who’d tested positive, and 20 deaths. Sixty of the residents remain COVID-positive.
Livingstone said the health authority has been doing its own review into what happened at the home. Things that have already been highlighted are infection control standards that weren’t up to SHA standards, additional personal protective equipment needed, and staffing levels in the facility weren’t high enough because of other things going on when the outbreak happened.
Livingstone said the structure of the facility is also a problem as there are a number of rooms in which four residents live.
He said a team has already identified other facilities that could be at a similar risk of an outbreak.
As for an inquiry, Livingstone said the health authority doesn’t get to make a decision on that, but if there is one he said he’s like it to look at both the relationship with the long-term care providers that operate outside the auspices of the SHA and how programs in the facilities operate in relation to SHA standards.
