Personal care homes push for in-house staff vaccinations winnipegfreepress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from winnipegfreepress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
It was the fax that changed everything. I ll never forget that gut-wrenching feeling when the case came back positive, says River East Personal Care Home administrator Kim Rohm, thinking back to Nov. 12. We were surprised.
A couple of days earlier, one of the 120 residents experiencing possible symptoms of COVID-19 was tested. The symptoms disappeared the next day.
Then the fax arrived. We now had COVID in our building, Rohm says. The second case came shortly after. Then it ramped up quickly. I ll never forget that gut-wrenching feeling when the case came back positive, says River East Personal Care Home administrator Kim Rohm, thinking back to Nov. 12. (Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press)
It made the lack of additional funding for these facilities in Wednesday’s budget shocking.
For a document titled
Protecting Manitobans, Budget 2021, the province seems to have forgotten about the most vulnerable of our population.
This was an opportunity to cement the promise of the implementation of the 17 recommendations made by the report several of which called for more funding and more staffing.
To be fair, the budget does denote an increase of $9.3 million of funding to go to the increased operational costs for two facility expansions in Steinbach and Carman. But that eats up the lion’s share of the $10.1 million increase in funding to long-term care services.
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An organization in Manitoba is looking for public input to thank the staff at care homes with their Unsung Heroes Campaign.
The Executive Director of The Long Term and Continuing Care Association of Manitoba, Jan Legeros and Executive Director of the Manitoba Association of Seniors Centers, Connie Newman, are the ones who came up with the Unsung Heroes Campaign.
Saying “thank you” is such a Canadian thing. The running joke from American television is that Canadians are so nice and polite; but despite this, we as Canadians and Manitobans have forgotten to thank those who are dealing with the impact of COVID-19 on front-line workers. Long Term Care residence staff have been overlooked. Media outlets have been reporting on deaths in care homes from COVID, but have failed to look at the impact COVID is actually having on frontline workers.
WINNIPEG Deaths in long-term care homes account for around half of all COVID-19 fatalities in Manitoba. It’s a stark reminder of the devastating toll the coronavirus pandemic has taken on vulnerable and elderly people. Looking back over the past year, advocates, experts and families point to a system they feel was unprepared for a threat hidden in plain sight one that some relatives say wasn’t taken seriously until it was too late. “We’re all going to end up in places like this at one point or another,” said Alvin Cadonic, who has an aunt and an uncle living at Maples Personal Care Home. “Really, we’re just fighting for own futures as well as the futures of our relatives that can’t advocate on their own.”