Friesen provides mostly excuses

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/11/2020 (1545 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Health Minister Cameron Friesen says his government did everything it could to prevent outbreaks of COVID-19 in personal care homes. If there were problems in the system leading up to the second wave of the pandemic — which has killed dozens of personal care home residents in recent weeks — it’s not his government’s fault.

That was the message Friesen gave Manitobans during a rare Sunday press conference, a day and a half after paramedics were called to Maples Personal Care Home to respond to one of the most deadly COVID-19 outbreaks in the province.

While Friesen said the “buck stops at my office” when it comes to the nursing home tragedy, he mostly blamed senior officials for not bringing concerns to him sooner.

“In the minister’s office, we can lead only so much as we know what the issues are,” said Friesen.

Once outbreaks began in PCHs (there are now 19 across the province), Friesen said he demanded regular briefings on them from senior health officials. However, nobody told him how bad things had become, Friesen complained, even though the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority inspected Maples on Nov. 2.

“My most recent briefing in respect of Maples was on Thursday morning at 8:15 and there was nothing provided to me at that briefing that would have led me to believe that somehow that situation was in imminent danger of deteriorating,” said Friesen. “So that raises important questions about what was going on at an operational level.”

It does. But it’s the minister’s job to know what those problems are, not to throw senior officials under the bus.

The fact he and Lanette Siragusa, the province’s chief nursing officer, claimed Sunday that government did everything it could to avoid these outbreaks was the height of buck-passing.

Siragusa said the province followed all of the recommendations from the Public Health Agency of Canada on how to protect personal care homes, claiming nothing more could have been done.

“I think we’ve done everything we can think of to prevent COVID from getting into these communities,” she said.

Actually, they didn’t.

The province had months of data and analysis from jurisdictions in Quebec and Ontario on how easily SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can get into nursing homes and how devastating the consequences can be. Despite that, very little, if anything, was done after initial measures were put in place in the spring to protect personal care homes in Manitoba.

In fact, one of those measures — a ban on health care staff working at multiple PCHs to help prevent the spread of the virus — has caused problems of its own. As PCH staff became infected with COVID-19 (or had to self-isolate for other reasons), facilities couldn’t reassign staff from other homes to fill vacancies. Maples is now using general labourers to fill in for certified health care aides.

That was a predictable outcome government should have planned for.

The whole point of emergency preparedness (including maintaining an incident command centre, which the Pallister government deactivated June 1 and only reconvened last week) is to anticipate these developments. These are the types of scenarios officials should have been discussing and taking action on over the summer.

“Not knowing all the details of this situation (at Maples), it sounds like they were staffed appropriately for normal operations, but this was not normal, this was more acute and more reinforcements needed to be there,” said Siragusa.

So why weren’t they? Why didn’t the province alter its minimum staffing requirements for PCHs months ago and add extra supports to prepare for a second wave? Why weren’t enhanced, targeted measures in place to better protect residents?

The fact paramedics had to spend seven hours at Maples Friday, in some cases to provide intravenous hydration (which suggests some residents were getting inadequate care), raises serious questions about government oversight of seniors’ homes.

Instead of taking responsibility for that, Friesen provided mostly excuses.

“Manitobans can have the assurance that our team is on this job,” he said.

Sure doesn’t feel like it.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca