As long-term care homes in B.C. adapt to essential visitor restrictions, the province’s top doctor says teams are working to bring social visitors back into the facilities as well.
Once rapid antigen tests and additional support staff are available, Dr. Bonnie Henry said the province will allow one social visitor per resident to return.
“We want to minimize the number of people that are going in and out of long-term care homes during this high-transmission period,” she said Tuesday.
“I did take the measure of restricting it to essential visitors for this past weekend because we were hearing about challenges with staffing and being able to screen visitors appropriately.”
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The province said rapid tests are being distributed to care homes this week and facilities are developing plans to support their use. Once that’s in place, social visits will resume.
No firm date was provided.
The BC Care Providers Association, meanwhile, is calling on the province to define ‘essential visitor’ in order to ease the burden on residents, families and home operators navigating the rules.
“It causes all kinds of confusion and is accompanied by a plan that needs to be developed by the operator, and adds to the huge bureaucracy at a time when critical staff shortages are very, very difficult to manage,” said CEO Terry Lake in an interview.
As it stands, operators and provincial health authorities are responsible for determining what qualifies as an essential visit, leaving a lot of room for “interpretation” within the rules, said Lake.
There was an “absolute lack of consultation” with operators before the essential visitor restriction was announced last week, he added, meaning there was little time to plan for the change and communicate with families.
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The Ministry of Health describes an essential visit as including, but not limited to compassionate care visits, visits that are “paramount” to the resident’s physical care and mental well-being, visits for supported decision-making, and assistance moving items in and out of resident rooms.
In a written statement to Global News, the department said residents can designate their own essential visitor, but only one is permitted under the rules.
Health authorities and operators must support those visits it added, even during a COVID-19 outbreak.
The department did not answer questions about calls to have more than one designated essential visitor per resident, or resources for obtaining essential visitor designation.
It’s a problem for Rahel Staeheli, whose grandmother Ruth lives in long-term care.
“She has told me, ‘I hate saying this to my granddaughter, but I want to die. I feel like I’ min prison time in isolation,” said Staeheli.
“My grandmother is not actively dying. She wishes and she prays for it every day.”
Of Ruth’s five children, Staeheli’s mother is the only one with essential visitor status.
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As it stands, there are 17 long-term care homes in the province with active outbreaks.
More than 70 per cent of B.C.’s population aged 70 and above has received a COVID-19 booster shot, along with close to 100,000 health-care workers and 160,000 people who are clinically extremely vulnerable.
Rather than restrict visitors in long-term care homes, Lake said the province should ensure all long-term care staff receive their booster shots.
“Instead, we are again putting the onus on residents, their families and operators that have to manage this in a way that doesn’t really provide the optimum protection, compared to making sure that everyone has a booster that’s working in long-term care.”
There are currently 27,106 active cases of COVID-19 in the province, more than 80 per cent of which are the Omicron variant.