Press Coverage

Months after a home-care service walked away from an Alzheimer’s patient — citing new provincial rules to prevent workplace violence — a nursing home is refusing to accept him into the facility.

Concerns that We Care Home Services raised about Ted Laugher, a 72-year-old Orléans man who has had the degenerative and fatal brain disease for 13 years, led Madonna Long-Term Care Residence to refuse admission, says his wife, Jeannine.

We Care, which provided home assistance to the Laughers for 31/2 years, reported to the Champlain Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) that the patient was, among other things, physically aggressive and violent toward its staff and his wife.

The CCAC, which co-ordinates home care and nursing-home admissions for the province, supplied that information, as well as an assessment by its own case worker, to the Orléans nursing home.

Jeannine says that information from We Care is either exaggerated or unfounded. But, she says, if Ted’s behaviour is as bad as Madonna outlines in a Nov. 1 letter, why is it OK for a 68-year-old woman to be left caring for her husband?

“If it’s too much for a nursing home in this field (of care), what does it mean for the families?” She says she doesn’t feel threatened by her husband, and neither should health-care workers.

The constituency office of Ottawa-Orléans MPP Phil McNeely is looking into the matter. McNeely, parliamentary assistant to Deb Matthews, Ontario’s Minister of Health and Long-term Care, refused comment.

The Public Citizen reported the couple’s problems with We Care in September. A Labour Ministry spokesman said the new workplace rules are designed so risks are identified and then minimized, but do not give employers the right to refuse service. Still, We Care never went back.

The CCAC hired Bayshore Home Health, which visits the Laugher home seven days a week, for about three hours daily.

Jeannine says Ted is in the advanced stages of the disease and can’t wait any longer for long-term care. He was on Madonna’s waiting list for about 21 months.

Jeannine also placed her husband on the waiting list at the Perley and Rideau Veterans Health Centre on Russell Road about 19 months ago, and, last summer, applied at Garden Terrace in Kanata.

Kim Peterson, the CCAC’s vice-president of client services, says a nursing home considers a number of criteria, including how specialized its services are for problematic Alzheimer’s patients. She also says there will be a need for more specialized units as the number of aggressive dementia patients grows.

If a facility rejects an applicant, the agency will work with families to find the right nursing home.

“That’s why we encourage clients to apply to more than one facility ... so the right situation is there to meet the needs of the client.”

Jeannine says she was never told by the CCAC that nursing homes can refuse admission. Had she known, she says she would have applied at others when she applied at Madonna.

If Ted is turned down by the Perley, Jeannine says they will probably be waiting until the summer of 2012 to hear if he can get into Garden Terrace.

“I can’t wait that long,” says Jeannine, who also cared for her mother for 11 years after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

She says the CCAC led her to believe last month that Ted was about to get into Madonna.

She says she was told: “He’s right at the top of the list. It should be any minute.”

But then came the letter. Madonna administrator Susan Wendt wrote that “the applicant’s care needs exceed the care level we are able to provide on our secured special care area.” (Jeannine applied for a single room that keeps patients locked inside when alone. Cost is about $2,200 a month.)

“The updated behaviours reported in the application (physical aggression and violence toward care staff and wife, resistance to care, increased aggression during personal care, destructive behaviour, verbal threats of violence to staff) would … pose a risk to our resident population and staff on our special-care unit.”

Most upsetting for Jeannine is that Ted is accused of being violent toward her.

“It’s just not true.”

She says he playfully bit her in front of a We Care worker last June, and Jeannine suspects that was in the report.

She says her husband has the mental capacity of a two-year-old, and is getting physically weaker as the disease progresses. She says that alone makes him more controllable than he was just a few years ago.

“If you read the literature, you’ll find out 70 per cent of Alzheimer’s patients are like my husband. So are they all going to stay at home?”

She admits her husband frequently puts up a fuss when caregivers try to remove his pants at bath time, but says that happens when they don’t take their time.

In an incident last June, around the same time the new workplace rules became law, he grabbed the arm of a We Care worker as she was trying to remove his trousers. In 2009, under similar circumstances prior to bath time at a nursing home — where he was placed temporarily to give Jeannine some respite — he swatted a caregiver’s face.

“If you don’t remove his pants, this man is laughing and in a good mood all the time because his basic nature in not aggressive,” says Jeannine.

She adds the Bayshore caregivers have told her that “they don’t find Ted challenging at all, (just) time-consuming.”

Jeannine wants to know why the CCAC, which hires home-care agencies for its clients, didn’t require We Care to meet with her and Ted’s caseworker to discuss its issues with her husband. She says she wanted to set the record straight because We Care had made accusations to the CCAC about her husband that weren’t true.

We Care refused to meet.