Bitten, Space – “Fine Temporum” season 2 finale
Elena and The Pack storm the Delphi building to save Savannah, the witches, and the werewolves in a final showdown against Aleister and Clara.
W5, CTV – “Abusive Care”
Disturbing images and tough questions. Abuse in long-term care homes by the very caregivers we expect to tend to our aging loved ones. Over the course of a year long investigation, W5 uncovered at least 1,500 cases of staff-to-resident abuse and neglect in nursing homes across Canada in 2013.
I work in both a nursing home and home care for my local health region as a Care Assistant (Nurse’s Aide). At the nursing home where I work, that W5 doc was a big topic of conversation. While there are many great people that work in nursing homes, there are several who got into this line of work for the wrong reasons (money and benefits) and should not be working with people at all as they do not care about what they do and do not care about the people they are looking after. After years of “fake caring” they have become bitter complainers who treat residents with continuous disrespect. There’s also those who work there who are burnt out, who now, after years of cutbacks to staffing, have felt they can’t do the job to satisfaction and have stopped caring because it’s gotten too impossible with all the rushing around and task lists that never get completed. Two days in a row last week, there were only two care assistants assigned to the wing I was on because they couldn’t fill the shift at regular time and do not want to fill it at overtime. Also, that wing was, until a year and a half ago, staffed with 4 care assistants, and back then it was too busy as it was. I was so exhausted after my second shift in a row working shorthanded and at night I woke up with horrible leg cramps (from walking too many steps on the cement floors). I ended up phoning in sick because I was so tired and in so much pain. The other woman I worked with, who is in her 60s and near retirement, also phoned in sick because her blood pressure had taken her to the ER after work. We filled out a work report, outlining how we couldn’t keep up with the workload and had not been able to carry out all our duties due to time constraints, and submitted it to the union office who forwarded it to management and the manager’s suggestion was to “use your time more efficiently and if we had to, pull someone from another wing for assistance”. How can you pull someone from another wing and make them short staffed? Don’t get me wrong, often I love my job, but sometimes it gets too hard and I leave feeling awful because I had to rush though all the various residents’ care. In Saskatchewan, the government recently adopted a lean program called “Kaizen” and all staff had to be trained in it. It’s a program taken from the Toyota factory in Japan and is about efficiency and preparedness and its based being able to predict outcomes. It’s a crock of cow patties though because providing healthcare is nothing like manufacturing a truck. You may be able to predict how long it takes to build a truck and how many parts you need but you can’t predict what care and how long of care to provide to a patient. It’s ridiculous. Sorry for my rant but I just watched that W5 doc plus the state of longterm care has been in a big issue in the news in Saskatchewan recently.