The banning of relatives and others from visiting residents in long-term care facilities was denounced yesterday by a number of people affected by this management practice.
Shauna McHarg, Hugette Hebert and and Dennis Dupuis have all been temporarily or permanently banned from visiting relatives in Alberta facilities. They told their stories at an Edmonton press conference organized by Public Interest Alberta, which is calling on the provincial government to stop facilities from banning people from seeing their loved ones without due process.
Also on hand was Ruth Adria of the Elder Advocates of Alberta who has been banned from a number of facilities after bing asked by families to look into concerns about quality of care or abuse.
The issue was first brought into the public eye in an article I wrote for the December issue of the Edmonton Senior newspaper on Shauna McHarg's lengthy struggle to get more access to her parents, residents on separate wards at the Edmonton General Continuing Care Centre operated by Covenant Health.
McHarg is restricted to seeing her mother one hour a day five days a week, and has no chance to see her father. She has also been banned from visiting friends she made among the residents, including the late Beverly Munro, who had been vocal about her own complaints against the facility.
Covenant Health management figures upheld the restrictions against McHarg, but would not tell her why. This prompted her to seek help from the health minister, the Alberta ombudsman, the Health Quality Council of Alberta and the Alberta Health Services patient concerns officer, and eventually file a Freedom of Information and Privacy (FOIP) request.
The whole rigamarole has produced some partial victories, and one aspect is now being looked at by a judge, but her experience has mainly been one of buck passing and denial of ability to act.
"My goal is to see my parents," she told me. "Despite following the process I've been told to follow and spending three years doing it, there's no solution. It doesn't seem like Covenant Health is accountable to anyone."
While Huguette Hebert was also banned from a Covenant Health facility, Daniel Dupuis has faced a month-long ban at the St. Therese Health Centre in St. Paul, where his 101-year-old mother lives.
"I have complied with all the restrictions they have placed on me over the past two years, yet there is no process in place where I can challenge these restrictions that allow me to visit my mother just one hour a day," he said. "How is this possible in Canada?"
Because she wanted to stay in her husband's room when he was being changed, to see if there were any pressure sores, Hebert was banned for a day and told that if she didn't cooperate she could be banned forever from seeing her husband.
"Now the CEO of Covenant Health has the audacity to say that the only reason they ban people is to protect patients or staff," said Hebert."Well, I think the reason they are abusing their power by banning people is to protect their own bottoms."
If health facility operators such as Covenant Health currently have policies on banning set out, they should be made public. If they do not have well-defined and reasonable policies, the policies should be developed. There also should be a process of appeal of any bannings and undue restrictions to an authority that can determine their legitimacy and compel redress if necessary.
The alternative may be a legal battle.
"If the government is not willing to act to empower families with real due process, then we will explore taking legal action to represent the rights of these families to be together," said Bill Moore-Kilgannon, executive director of Public Interest Alberta. The organization is asking people who have people who have banned or threatened with banning to get in touch with them with a view to the possibility of joint legal action.
