Three care homes cope with COVID-19 outbreaks

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/12/2021 (1003 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Three outbreaks in Manitoba personal care homes have staff and families on high alert under the threat of increased Omicron transmission.

Video calls with his mother at Beacon Hill Lodge are off the table, John Dobbin said, because of a lack of staff to offer the service after eight employees at the downtown Winnipeg home tested positive for COVID-19 this week.

“It’s so stressful,” the Winnipegger said. “No matter how bad it is for me, it’s so much worse for my mom. We can’t visit her, we can’t call her… her isolation is such that the visits are so important to her well-being, and yet we can’t reach out in a normal way without causing a possibility of infection spread.”

Many families are in the same position, he knows. Essential visits to dying residents and visits from designated family caregivers are still permitted during the outbreak, but Dobbin said he doesn’t want to take the chance of spreading the virus.

“It’s the type of thing that keeps you awake at night… and I’m local. There’s so many people who have to reach out from another province,” he said.

Revera Inc., which runs Beacon Hill Lodge, issued an update Tuesday and held a conference call with residents’ families to inform them about the outbreak.

No cases have been confirmed among residents. As of last August, one Beacon Hill resident had died linked to a previous outbreak.

“We recognize how difficult these measures are for residents and their families. We appreciate the patience and understanding of families as we put these precautions in place for the safety of the residents. Revera continues to do everything we can to keep our residents and employees safe as we work to prevent the spread of COVID-19 at our long-term care homes and retirement residences,” Revera’s chief medical officer Dr. Rhonda Collins stated Dec. 21 of the outbreak at Beacon Hill.

Dobbin said his 83-year-old mother, Gail Dobbin, has Alzheimer’s and has not been able to walk since she contracted the virus in the fall of 2020 and spent more than three months in a hospital COVID-19 ward before moving in to Beacon Hill. She’s waiting on results of a recent COVID-19 test.

“Although she’s triple-vaxxed, I don’t know that she could take a sniffle at this point,” Dobbin said.

Beacon Hill has “superior protocols” for infection control, Dobbin said — he doesn’t blame the facility or its staff.

“They’ve got good protocols there. They always have gowns, they always have goggles, they always have masks. I mean, this is not a slipshod program. I don’t know if it’s Omicron that’s sweeping through there, but eight staff members getting sick is a big surprise.”

But this has already been a difficult couple of years for his family, and, he says, for so many others. His father Michael died in July after contracting COVID-19 months earlier. The stroke that led to his death was associated with complications of the virus, Dobbin said.

There are active cases at the Salem Home (evergreen unit) in Winkler and at Lions Prairie Manor in Portage la Prairie.

Neither the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority nor Shared Health keep specific data showing how many personal-care home and health-care staff are off work because of a COVID-19 outbreak, whether they are sick themselves or have been required to self-isolate.

katie.may@winnipegfreepress.com