A number of red flags shot up following last week’s announcement by Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) that it was closing Shorncliffe and Totem Lodge in two years and replacing them with a 128-bed residential care facility operated by a firm called Trellis Group.
The replacement facility is VCH’s response to the ongoing shortage of long-term care beds for seniors on the Sunshine Coast. As such, the announcement is welcome and long overdue. But as a number of our readers pointed out this week, there are some big question marks around VCH’s decision.
First, capacity. The new facility will result in a net increase of 20 residential care beds (two of them hospice beds) in Sechelt. Since that number will barely absorb the current waiting list in the community, and given the region’s high and rising senior demographic, the number seems wholly inadequate. Is VCH developing a contingency plan, perhaps utilizing a portion of either of the two private seniors facilities that are in the application stage? We don’t know.
Second, quality of care. While we have seen nothing to indicate that Trellis Group, which operates three facilities in the Interior, provides a level of service below what we have come to expect from VCH, there are deep concerns about “the wholesale privatization of seniors care” in B.C., as Hospital Employees Union (HEU) official Jennifer Whiteside said this week. A warning from reader Paul Rhodes in the letters section spells out the dismal trajectory of health-care privatization in Britain. Are we in for the same? We don’t know.
Third, staff. Directly tied to the privatization issue, the impact of the coming changes on current staff is especially worrisome. Two years of job insecurity is not healthy for any worker, and it’s not just union officials who are concerned. One Sechelt man whose wife lives in Shorncliffe wrote us this week saying how impressed he’s been by the quality and kindness of staff and how he doesn’t want to lose a single one of them. Those feelings are commonplace among families whose loved ones are in care. Will lower wages and fewer benefits drive out high-value workers? We don’t know.
Whiteside said anxiety levels are high among HEU members and the union is requesting information from VCH to help alleviate those concerns. More information is needed on a variety of fronts, and it’s really B.C.’s health minister who should be providing it, since “Vancouver” Coastal Health is a creature of the provincial government and does not answer to the electorate.
Dropping a bombshell of this magnitude and then walking away is no way to treat a community.
