Ideology must not replace common sense

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/12/2024 (485 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba wants to shutter private, for-profit nursing agencies and shift their home-care clients back into the public system.

Anyone who’s had to use that public system knows it’s appalling.

I have friends whose infirm parents had to rely on public care and who frequently had to drive two hours to get to a parent whose worker hadn’t shown up, or who were warned at 5 p.m. on Friday of a long weekend that there wouldn’t be anyone to attend to their parent all weekend.

Social media is rife with these complaints. Many are life-threatening.

And Premier Wab Kinew knows that very well.

On Oct. 4, 2022, he raised in the legislature the case of Sathya Kovac, 44-year-old ALS victim, who killed herself because she couldn’t get enough home care to support her survival.

“We hear too many stories of cancelled and inadequate supports for patients and families, and Miss Kovac herself clearly said that she felt the system failed her. There should be every effort made to ensure our home-care system does not fail another Manitoban,” he said.

Well, it continues to fail. Badly.

A couple more stories scraped from social media (names removed):

“Friday: no one shows up, chase them down, after an hour and a half on the phone they finally send someone … Late this afternoon, didn’t show up, call again … If I required critical care at this point I’d probably be dead.”

Or “my family has been dealing with home care for over 30 years … People like my family member have been routinely abandoned without notice, leaving them to fend for themselves for hours or even days when they cannot transfer, toilet, feed, or bathe themselves without assistance.”

My little story is nothing by comparison. I resorted to private home care after two hip replacements (done a year ago in the U.S. under the now-cancelled program that farmed out surgeries to — yep — private care; had I waited for surgery here, I’d still be hobbling on a walker).

Told I would need home care for a few days after surgery to leave bed, toilet, shower, and get food, I called months before to arrange it.

“We can send someone to do an assessment five days after you get home.”

An assessment?

Uh … but five days out, I wouldn’t need help.

That glaringly obvious problem became irrelevant once I was told “You have dogs? We will not take care of dogs. You would have to put them away in a room with the door closed before your worker will come in.”

If I couldn’t get out of bed on my own, how was I supposed to do that?

Never mind, said I, and called a private agency. The very next day, the private agency supervisor showed up to assess my projected needs, ascertain the pups were inoffensive, and work out the schedule.

I didn’t even try to get public care for the second stint.

But ideologically, private home-care agencies, like privatized medical care, stick in the craws of the New Democrats, who firmly believe the public system is the right and only way to address Canadians’ medical needs.

And I agree. I really do.

Ideally, yes, of course.

We all pay into the system; we all get the care we need. Those of us who need more care are subsidized by those of us who, luckily, do not.

But this is not an ideal world, is it?

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara says “for-profit companies perpetuated a cycle of burnout and mandatory overtime that hurt patients and exhausted nurses, all while they raked in revenue.”

Seems to me that cycle has been perpetuated by demand that has, for decades, increasingly outstripped service availability. Private agencies emerged to fill the need.

The New Democrats apparently think nurses who supposedly fled public home care to work privately would flood joyfully back to the public system, if promised better pay and scheduling.

Our health minister says Manitoba has hundreds of contracts with more than 70 private, for-profit agencies.

Who are they serving, if not clients who cannot rely on public care?

Somebody needs to tell us how many patients are currently supported by private care, and exactly how they would be served by the public system, which has been broken for decades and is only getting worse.

Two years ago, Kinew was fully aware of the plethora of “cancelled and inadequate supports for patients and families.”

I leave Kinew and Asagwara with this question: Were it not for private care filling the void left by the failed public system, how many people would be left sitting in their own feces, in beds they can’t get out of, until the public system were to somehow magically, miraculously, staff up overnight to actually fulfil Manitobans’ needs?

Yeah. I didn’t think you’d have that number handy.

Retired journalist Judy Waytiuk now runs (yes, runs) agility with her younger dog, and visits a nursing home every week with her older pet therapy dog.