At the coroner’s public inquiry into the deaths in CHSLDs, senior official Natalie Rosebush assured Wednesday that no one had fabricated a document about watch visits to CHSLDs.
The day before, the oppositions were worried about the possibility that Quebec had created from scratch an Excel sheet which was given to the coroner Géhane Kamel on Monday.
Information in the document suggested that it was created on November 16, 2021, the same day Ms. Rosebush – who is the assistant deputy minister of the senior citizens and caregivers branch – testified for the first time at the coroner’s inquest.
“When we see the date of November 16, it means that you printed it on November 16, not [cette journée-là] ? “Asked the coroner who is leading the investigation, Géhane Kamel.
“This is the date on which the person at the piloting level picked up the information,” replied Ms. Rosebush. In clear terms, this is the date on which members of his teams went to extract the documents required by the coroner.
Ms. Rosebush also tried to clarify the explanations she had provided during her first testimony in November about the lookout visits to CHSLDs. In summary, reviewers could take handwritten notes, but then had to record their observations in an Excel file.
Each new entry erased the previous one, Ms. Rosebush had said during this testimony. “At that time, we had no indication that we had all the history of these grids, updated by computer,” she said Wednesday. It was therefore later that his teams realized that they had backup copies, which they sent to the coroner.
The question of the follow-ups made following these watch visits gave rise to long discussions and confused explanations.
“Were there any interventions by the ministry following observations made in the grids? “, For example asked lawyer Patrick Martin-Ménard, who represents the families of people who died in CHSLDs. “We had a lot of communication with the caregivers,” replied Ms. Rosebush.
A little later, Coroner Kamel seemed to be impatient. “If there are any follow-up documents following the assessor’s visit, I want that document. I don’t know if I’m the only one to understand myself, ”she said.
Ms. Rosebush also revealed that it was necessary to wait “from memory, at the end of April or May” before the information collected on various CHSLDs were brought together, in what she called “the CHSLD topos”.
No visits to red zones
Natalie Rosebush also declared that the evaluators dispatched to CHSLDs had, in some cases, not had access to the red zones. “People could go inside the environment, subject to certain sections to avoid contamination,” she summarized.
In short, the evaluators met the “responsible persons”, who answered their questions and took them on the “tour”, as far as possible. Given the limited nature of the visits, why not have asked the people on site to fill in the evaluation grids directly ?, asked Me Kamel.
She also confirmed, as revealed by the Ombudsperson in her report on the first wave of the pandemic, that the CHSLDs received an initial direction to prepare for outbreaks on March 12.
“The guide for adapting services in CHSLDs was handed out on March 12 and I, on March 12, had conferences with them,” said Ms. Rosebush.
“On March 1, a first case is declared and the guide will appear around March 12. There are ten days in between. There is an H1N1 pandemic plan and why we do not trigger it, why is it not that we are working on? It’s that little bit that bothers me, ”said Coroner Kamel.
Me Martin-Ménard then presented the minutes of a meeting of the “network management committee”, which agreed on March 9, 2020 “to update the plan to fight a pandemic developed for H1N1 and add an annex dedicated to COVID ”. What to add a new level of confusion, since the former Minister of Health Danielle McCann declared during her visit to the coroner’s inquest that the CEOs of the CISSS and CIUSSS “had to set in motion” the plan to fight a pandemic “from January”.