I was telling you about Léa Rose last week. A 4-year-old girl with a rare syndrome who needs to be hooked up to machines at night. A nursing assistant dispatched by the CIUSSS spends six nights a week watching over Léa Rose.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
And there, the family moved to Laval. 8 kilometers from his home in Ahuntsic. The family informed the CIUSSS three months in advance of the move to avoid losing the nursing assistant who was quite willing to do the same job, in Laval…
But on the day of the move, at the beginning of October, it was still kidding at the CISSS de Laval for the transfer of the nurse to Léa Rose’s new house. Nothing settled. The CISSS and the CIUSSS were still measuring the small boxes.
I remind you that Léa Rose’s angel had even been hired by a private agency – at a lower salary – while the CISSS and the CIUSSS put their flutes in place.
And a week ago, well, there was a “break in service”, according to official poetry: no angel alongside Léa Rose for the night from Wednesday to Thursday, when she was told by her agency private that she should set up a business to continue to be paid (!).
I spoke about it on Friday, and I told you: it is sure that with the noise around this affair, thanks to the Instagram status of the mother, thanks to this column, it will be settled.
It’s settled.
Where three months of forms, calls, follow-ups and emails had failed, the CIUSSS du Nord-de-l’Île-de-Montréal and the CISSS de Laval miraculously found a way to hire Léa Rose’s nursing assistant, to pay her to do the same work, paid with the same taxes…
I’m talking to you about Léa Rose and I’m looking at the overflowing emergencies.
Two sides of the same coin, basically, that of a broken, dysfunctional health system.
In Outaouais, in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, it’s worse: more than 200% occupancy rate. Patients are piled up in emergency rooms, which are not made for that. And we are not yet in the flu peak that overwhelms emergencies in winter.
Caregivers who are exhausted, who are exhausted. We are short of arms, so the caregivers who remain are on their knees. We can therefore spend up to 24 hours in the emergency room. Capacity: over 120% is the provincial average…
But we got used to this mediocrity. We haven’t been talking about it for years, we want change, no: it’s been decades. For decades we have been promised to make the emergency room more efficient.
Here, take this headline, which could have been published in a newspaper this week: “Hospitals: Quebec puts order in emergencies”. When do you think it was published?
March 11, March 11… 1980.
But we get used to it. You get used to the idea that if you twist your ankle on a Saturday night, you’ll have to hang around in the emergency room for 6, 7, 8, 12 or 15 hours. Maybe 24…
Don’t forget your cord to connect your telephone, some Tylenol and, why not, a Chef Boyardee cane.
Message received yesterday about a hospital in Greater Montreal. A citizen watches over his old father, who has had a fall and the fall has made him confused. The father is in bed, but he feels like it. He wants to go to the toilet. He stubbornly refuses to relieve himself in his “comfort panties”, as they say, if not to say a diaper. Because the old man may be confused, but he’s not confused enough to have forgotten his dignity…
The son rings for help: he does not want to help his father alone, there is too much risk of falling. It sounds.
It rings again.
And even.
The son timed it: it took exactly 1 hour and 37 minutes before someone answered.
It’s nothing at all, in the grand scheme of things: just an old man who didn’t want to pee in his diaper. No one is going to die from this, you will tell me.
But it is also a Polaroid that says everything about what is not going well in our hospitals, in “taking care”: 1 hour and 37 minutes to respond to a call for help, in a hospital room.
I don’t blame the employees. They were responding to other more urgent emergency bells, I imagine.
I think back to Mr. Legault, in the countryside, who defended tooth and nail the idea of these luxury CHSLDs that are seniors’ homes: “Nothing too good for our seniors! »
Except for the elders who refrain from pissing in a hospital where there is no tape to cut, announcement to lather in a press release.
By the way, have you noticed that in the past 20 years, three ministers of health have become prime ministers? Philippe Couillard, Pauline Marois and… François Legault. The proof that there is no political price to pay for not settling anything in health.
I don’t know if that says more about politics or about Quebecers, who believe at each election that there, that’s it! it will change…
By the way, I think back to people hanging around in the emergency room. Someone thought to ask them what they think of deputies who are obliged to take an oath of allegiance to King Charles III? Seems to me like I’d see a vox pop over it on TV.
Long detour to return to the case of Léa Rose, who finally had her nursing assistant, after months of bureaucratic gossip between a CISSS and a neighboring CIUSSS…
I published the column on Friday. That day, the nurse had the confirmation: you are hired. A contact told me, also that day, that it was already bureaucratically settled, the story of the auxiliary nurse, when I published…
The chronicle came out on the 14th.
The date the nursing assistant was hired?
Tuesday the 11th, the day after the mother’s Instagram status, the day I sent my questions to the CISSS de Laval.
Translation: the CISSS hired the practical nurse on Tuesday… but the practical nurse only found out on Friday.
She could have been alongside Léa Rose on Wednesday. But the CISSS had not informed her of her hiring.
Isn’t that wonderfully absurd?
The health system is a mammoth, a huge mammoth too big not to know that its hindquarters are a bumper from Lada.