Health Minister Rejean Hebert admitted Wednesday he dropped the ball on an idea to help seniors' homes that may have made them less safe.
A month before the seniors’ residence fire in L'Isle-Verte, Hebert’s ministry proposed new guidelines about safety, including that smaller homes would no longer be required to have a nurses’ aid on duty at night, and that the on-duty supervisor would only be required to be trained in CPR, even if that supervisor is a resident of the home.
Current government guidelines require at least one nurses’ aid working overnight.
“Sometimes during the night, people get very ill and you need people that are trained to be able to answer to their needs,” said Linda Boudreau of Place Mariette Residence, which is home to nine seniors in Notre-Dame-de-Grace.
The minister said the plan, which never came to be, was to save the seniors’ homes money.
“Otherwise the people living in those facilities would have seen a large increase in the rental amount,” said Hebert.
In the wake of the tragedy at L’Isle-Verte, talk of cutting back on safety was a political minefield. Hebert was panned by the opposition Wednesday, with Liberal opposition critic for seniors Marguerite Blais saying it’s a bad idea.
“Do you think it's good that a person living in the home is looking after old people at night?” she said.
Boudreau said she believes the health minister is out of touch.
“I think that he really doesn't know what's going on,” she said, adding that what's needed is more money to hire more professionals to care for people in residences.
“They are afraid of nights there in their room. They’re alone. There's no one surrounding so here what we do is going around every 45 minutes to an hour,” said Boudreau.
Initially, Hebert sought to shift the blame to bureaucrats in his office, but late Wednesday afternoon, he took responsibility, admitting the idea was a mistake.
