Nix for-profit nursing homes, nurses say
Ontario should eliminate “forprofit” long-term care homes, the Wettlaufer inquiry has been told.
The recommendation was made Tuesday in final submissions by a lawyer for the Ontario Nurses’ Association, who noted that the long-term care homes in which serial killer Elizabeth Wettlaufer committed her crimes were for-profit ones.
Public funding that ends up as profit for private owners is used to pay staff in non-profit homes, ONA lawyer Kate Hughes explained.
“There are limited dollars for funding,” she said. “Should ministry funding go to owners or should it go to staffing?”
ONA wants the province’s health ministry to develop a plan to ensure the for-profit sector is eliminated within five years.
Alternatively, it wants any new long-term care beds to be in not-for-profit homes. The Doug Ford government has committed to opening up 30,000 new long-term care beds by 2028.
Hughes noted that the inquiry has heard that the homes where Wettlaufer worked had a difficult time holding on to nursing staff. They preferred to work in a nearby non-profit municipally run home, which offered better pay and benefits.
The inquiry is probing the circumstances that allowed nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer to go undetected as she killed eight patients in southwestern Ontario nursing homes over the course of almost a decade.
Wettlaufer checked herself into a mental health hospital in 2016 and confessed to carrying out the crimes. She subsequently pleaded guilty to injecting the patients with overdoses of insulin.
Public hearings, which got underway in June, are wrapping up this week. Organizations with standing at the public inquiry are making recommendations in the hope that Commissioner Eileen Gillese will include them in her final report, to be released next year.
Many of ONA’s recommendations focused on issues of staffing and funding.
“All roads lead to problems with staffing and funding,” Hughes said, arguing that registered nurses in long-term care homes have too many acutely ill residents to care for.
Homes are required to have only one RN on the night shift, which Wettlaufer often worked.
“No one was there to see Elizabeth Wettlaufer, no one was there to stop her, no one was there to report her, and no one was there to report her,” Hughes said.
A lawyer representing the Ontario Association of Residents’ Councils took aim at the operators of the homes. A “culture of complacency” and “failure of leadership” at the homes allowed Wettlaufer to repeatedly commit murder, Suzan Fraser charged.