Long term care in crisis?

c2011 (S)


My dad has been moved from a retirement home to a long term care facility. The reasons are simple. The retirement home, while it offers certain services to the elderly, simply could not give him the level of care and attention he needed. They have two staff during the day and one at night, and he required help showering, going to the bathroom, getting to the dining room, and dressing.

The long term care facility has a lot more staff to help him and the other residents.

Still, the difference is stark. Before, he had a private suite of about 600 square feet, with a bedroom, a living room, and a bathroom of about ten feet by ten feet. Now he shares a space less than half that size.

All of this is useless to someone who is completely immobilized by Parkinson's disease, or any other serious affliction.

The long term care room is semi-private, and the bathroom is about five by six feet. It is shared by four residents. It has two doors, one on each side. There is no way I can maneuver my dad on and off the toilet, and in fact they have a lifting device not unlike a drywall lifter to get him up and down.

He hates the place, understandably enough. We are getting him a better wheelchair, as the one they found for him is downright dangerous. The thing almost fell over backwards yesterday.

"I've never been so humiliated in my life," he told me after two nurses helped him go to the bathroom.

This morning he told a nurse that my sister 'abandoned me here, and left me all alone.'

When I went in to visit, the nurse found him sleeping with his face jammed down onto his coffee cup in the dining room...

It's not good. Everything in the place seems small, cramped, and more than anything badly designed. He's on a waiting list for a bed in a more modern building, and hopefully he gets in there in the next few weeks or months.

In the meantime, the elder care crisis just gets worse, and with a recession that never seems to end, and governments tightening up all around, there is clearly no end in sight.

With a falling birthrate, and some pressure to limit immigration, we just aren't making new taxpayers fast enough. With capitalists thinking that keeping wages low is a substitute for investment in newer, more productive processes, we can't expect much help from the economy any time soon, either.

As for Canada's much-touted economic recovery, they've been telling that big lie for over three years now.