Red Cross may help Parkview Place amid outbreak

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This article was published 29/10/2020 (2113 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The long-term care home that has Manitoba’s deadliest COVID-19 outbreak may call in emergency help from the Red Cross and staffing agencies, residents’ family members were told in a conference call with management Thursday.

A community patrol organization has also volunteered to go in to Parkview Place to help out.

“We had a generous offer from a local community patrol group to come in to the home and assist us. We are consulting with the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority on whether or not this is permitted,” said Jason Chester, regional director of operations for Revera in Manitoba.

“There is also the potential for the Red Cross to provide some additional support, perhaps in the form of comfort care, companion care, meal support, cleaning and much more,” he told more than 60 people who tuned in to the conference call.

Nineteen people have died of the virus inside Parkview Place personal care home in downtown Winnipeg and there are currently 26 active cases among the home’s 216 residents; 61 COVID-19 cases are considered resolved. The company that runs the home, Revera, held a phone-in town hall meeting Thursday evening during which several staff members answered emailed questions from families and spoke about how the facility is dealing with staffing shortages, contact tracing and resident care.

They told families an emergency recruiting team is in place to hire staff for Revera in Manitoba and across Canada, and 19 new staff members have been recruited for Parkview Place in addition to 20 housekeepers. Meanwhile, 14 employees are self-isolating, 15 workers have recovered from the virus, and 159 workers have been tested. An epidemiologist team is expected to take on contact tracing, which will free up Parkview Place staff, families were told.

During the call, Revera staff responded to news reports that Parkview residents who tested positive were not being separated from their roommates. Seventeen rooms in the personal care home are what management calls “semi-private,” meaning residents have roommates. Chester said Parkview Place has been working with the WRHA in all decision making.

“Every decision we’ve made relating to testing, cohorting, infection prevention and control, has been in concert with them. Some of these decisions are very complicated and it’s hard to get the full story across in the news reports,” Chester said.

He said there were cases in which a resident tested positive but their roommate’s test result had not yet come back, so staff decided not to move anyone who had potentially been exposed to the virus until test results were known.

“That’s the level of detail that sometimes doesn’t make sense in news reports, and we have to take into very careful consideration, before we just respond and then react,” he said.

Family members were told they can expect future phone-in town hall meetings about the situation at Parkview Place, and management expressed their condolences to those who’ve lost loved ones.