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The death and misery that consumed our LTCHs has never been properly accounted for. It’s understandable why many would rather forget the horrific scenes that played out in these homes. Elderly Canadians left for weeks in soiled diapers. Seniors crying out for help as bed bugs literally ate them alive. Patients given expired medication, sedated with narcotics for being sad, force fed until they choked and abandoned to suffer from bed ulcers. And then there was the actual virus.
Yet when it comes to LTCHs, an independent public inquiry doesn’t seem nearly adequate enough. It’s not that we didn’t know, or don’t know now, what was wrong or how to fix it; it’s that the owners of the homes, and the governments who oversee them, refuse to. In any other context, what happened to seniors inside our long-term care facilities would be criminal. Instead, provincial governments moved to shield operators from lawsuits.
Even now, nearly 20-million vaccine doses in Canada are set to expire by the end of 2023. Most will go unused, yet there’s no sign of a plan to share them with countries that could use them.