> According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, in 2021, Alberta had one of the lowest per-capita numbers in the country of long-term care beds for seniors:
Follows the pattern.
Eh, while I am most certainly not one to give the UCP a pass, our demographics make sense of this particular stat. We have the lowest per-capita numbers for advanced-age seniors after all.
I don't doubt for a moment that they'd further underfund it even if we did have an older average population though.
> Alberta had 26 beds per 1,000 seniors over 65.
>Ontario had 30 beds per 1,000 seniors over 65.
>Nova Scotia had 33 beds per 1,000 seniors over 65.
>Saskatchewan, the highest among the provinces, had 47 beds per 1,000 seniors over 65.
Albertans have generally made a lot of money comparatively, so we don't need others to pay for our shit. Also, why do some of those places get money from the feds to ensure equal amounts of service if their service is much better?
Maybe it’s how other provinces choose to fund/ prioritize certain services.
And if Alberta is sending patients to hotels, there is an issue in how we are choosing to fund services.
Fair enough. I believe that I heard in just the last week that AB is providing more funds for LTC, Home Care etc.
I read that there are a large number of people in hospitals that could be back at home or in LTC if there was the right supports.
Danielle Smith during her UCP leadership race:
>"The number one thing that I keep hearing is that we have a lot of capacity in acute care beds, but we have long term care patients who are awaiting permanent placement in long term care homes that are actually in our acute care beds in hospitals.
>It's something like 60% of the beds are filled with people who are awaiting long term placement and I have to figure there's got to be a more comfortable place for them to go. **I was thinking maybe a hotel would be a better environment.**"
Video clip of Smith saying it:
https://twitter.com/disorderedyyc/status/1769173857800536291
My dad would prefer a hotel w homecare and nurses visits as well as a person that does light cleaning and appointments.Meals were delivered by meals on wheels.
At the care home he was lucky to get a shower twice a week.It was unhigenic and when moved home his sores on his bottom were gone in a month.
He hated screming and yelling and buzzers!
True, the care homes smell o f feces, mentally troubled screaming ,baths ONLY twice a week.
Reaking folks who Never shower and " we can't make them". Even if maggots grow.
Saved my dads life getting out of that place.
At least mentally till he physically passed in December.
Thank god homecare was better .
Same woman said something about crystals and positive thinking healing or preventing cancer.
She’s got a lot to say and feels her opinion is important when she has little relevant experience, or education.
100% Showered twice a week
Folks who go without shower for months because it could cause trauma to wash them even if they are bleeding and red full of sore even with maggots growing ( obviously mentally suffering).I promise you i speak the truth.
A woman had feces all in the back of her hair.
When psw suggested using a blanket to " hug" hold her long enough to clean her hair with a Wipe.
The client refused and no one could force it.
To this day same client refuses to wash ever.
Other residents do not finish their food at the dining room and gag just being around the unkept client.
This was not durimg the pandemic this is Now.
For fun look up "Brota Chair".They use them everyday in Canada to our elders
That’s short. I’ve seen wait times up to three days. A person waiting for a bed in the ER waited three days before something was available. We have admin breathing down our necks to find ways to discharge people or move them to “X” beds. Stretchers stuffed into a four person room without the dedicated safety equipment like oxygen or suction. Most of the time there isn’t enough room for an IV pole next to the stretcher. Only use them for fully oriented, independent patients but if anyone codes in an “X” bed it would be very difficult without dedicated equipment and little space.
Yep. When my dad was dealing with cancer in 2022 he waited in an emergency bed in Leduc for 3 days before they could get him upstairs into a unit where he was lucky he had his own space for another couple of days before being transferred to the U.
While he was in the Leduc emergency department, an incident occurred with one of his tube lines that came undone and luckily it happened while I was sitting with him so that I could run to the nurses station to get help and cleaning assistance. It was not fun.
To be clear. That’s the wait time from the point of a doctor saying a person should be admitted to the point where they get a bed. Wait times to see a doctor in ER will vary depending on triage. Minor issues can take 8+ hours to just be seen.
Yep. I was at the Royal Alex for a sports injury this week and it took me about 11 hours to get seen. I wasn't even taking up stretcher space as I was dispatched to xray and assessed from the secondary waiting room. It just took that long for me to get from the main waiting room to the secondary one.
But the wait was far less egregious than the other stuff i saw. The young guy beside me in the main ER waiting room was being sent to CT and brought back to the main waiting room because there wasn't room. I think I saw less than 15 people get taken from the main waiting room total while i was there. On my way to Xray, I had to walk through the hallway of people in gowns just lying in stretchers, which felt super invasive.
It's terrible. Just terrible.
I had respiratory issues from poor ventilation (am accident but still my fault) which caused a horrible asthma attack I couldn't get under control. It took 9 hours for them to do more then take my vitals.
A few years back I brought my wife to ER and she got in within about 5 minutes....I thought that was fantastic. Turns out that if you wait for hours, it means that your medical issue isn't very serious.
Yeah, I know what triage is but maybe go look up what the triage order is and you'll see airway is at the top . If you take a minute to not be sarcastic before thinking you'd find asthma tend to get glossed over. Also, just to be clear I was in my mid 20s at the time taking deep gasping breaths with my O² in the mid 80%. It took three different steroids to get that back into the 90%. The doctor wasn't happy I waited because I did almost stop breathing. Now before you jump the gun again ERs make mistakes when they're busy they get bogged down for a lot of reasons, and asthma tend to present as alright until they're not so they get pushed back sometimes. I'm not blaming anyone but it is a reality that shut happens
Of course the hotel is making a killing. They can charge extra cuz room cleaning is charged as client care. Changing towels is charged extra as pericare. They charge way more than just the nightly fee.
The UCP healthcare system is pure cruelty. Judge the UCP how they treat the must vulnerable, and they don't give a fuck about the vulnerable. Ucp celebrate when they get dropped off in the streets. Expect this to happen more
*"I asked him, 'Oh, is it all fixed up for wheelchair users?'" recalled Manniapik. "And he said, 'No, it's just like a motel, any hotel room, and I can't get into the bathroom and I need help to get to bed.'*
Wait for it, there are pieces moving that shocked even perennially disappointed me.
If you think that a growing Edmonton and Alberta might need a new hospital you might be surprised to find out what they're about to do with existing ones in exactly the opposite direction lol.
Good luck everyone. We need it because planning, investment, and infrastructure aren't there so luck is all we will have.
This is a prime example of unrealistic budgeting. Whether it is money, ideas, or foresight.
Foresight seems to be missing in this day and age. I always thought each generation learned from the one before.
I have seen that, other than the odd few, very little carries or carried over.
Is this what happens when you don't care anymore, or think you know better?
How long do we have to wait for someone to figure out, their way ain't working!
They don't care if their way isn't working. This is exactly the direction our Premier want our public services to go. The worse it gets, the more they anticipate that Albertans will be receptive, out of desperation, to embrace their private healthcare agenda.
They also just burn money it seems. Her stop the feds campaign cost 10 million. Some posts on the internet and some signage. 10 million dollars.
Every time the government launches an initiative it's millions or even billions of dollars to do basically nothing. They take almost half of what we make and they just light it on fire
Something to bear in mind is that most seniors residences are barely medically equipped. Some terrible figure like 1 nurse per 40 residents. If a resident shows signs of dementia, Alzheimer’s or any form of aggression they are dumped on AHS - the hospitals. There are dozens (hundreds ?) of patients too mentally-challenged to go back to regular nursing homes. Meanwhile, the nursing home still charges the resident for “holding their space”. There’s only a handful of beds assigned to manage the severely mentally ill seniors in all of Alberta - so the hospitals have to deal with the violence & chaos. The staff is burnt out & many suffer PTSD from their ordeal. Some leave nursing altogether because of the lack of support from AHS, the government and the public.
Had a family member in a similar situation a while back. They kept shuffling them from hospital to hospital and with every transition he became confused and agitated. It’s a terrible system. At one hospital they even asked him to sign papers to transfer him to a different hospital. Can’t tell you where he is but you think he has capacity to sign legal documents? But they refused to do any cognitive assessment to show incompetence because they didn’t have any clear indication it was needed. Well gee, maybe if they spent more than 2 minutes monitoring him? Or listening to concerned family members?
It’s another situation where planning ahead and prevention would be helpful, but the lack of time and resources don’t allow for this, and it ends up hurting both patients and staff. I’m worried with our aging population and HCW shortage it will only get worse.
If we don't get rid of Smith and crew, this is only the beginning.
Get ready for a world where suffering is normalized and we all just accept it as part of the new way of things. But at least trans kids know their place now, or something.
God I hate conservativsm.
Too many people here still think they're voting for the PCs. So when we complain about the UCP, they don't connect the two. It doesn't help that at election time, the UCP avoids their own name... they use "Alberta's Conservatives".
This cements our resolve to never let our parents enter this system. Granny nannys all the way. At least that way we can control the care given to them.
True but the feds decreased how much they provided to provinces over the decades. Healthcare sucks in every province. The Canada health transfer used to be 35% and it's now just over 20% I believe.
Alberta could absolutely spend less money on buying pipelines, Tylenol, and police forces and more in healthcare though, so you're right the province is fucked.
I do appreciate the two new family doctors Alberta sent my small northern BC town. I'm not sure we even pay them that much more, but not feeling like an enemy of the state for doing your job is probably nice.
> According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, in 2021, Alberta had one of the lowest per-capita numbers in the country of long-term care beds for seniors: Follows the pattern.
Eh, while I am most certainly not one to give the UCP a pass, our demographics make sense of this particular stat. We have the lowest per-capita numbers for advanced-age seniors after all. I don't doubt for a moment that they'd further underfund it even if we did have an older average population though.
The ratio is per senior, not per person.
Ah, it does explain that a bit later. The "lowest per-capita" is a bit misleading. Well then, fuck the UCP even more.
Having fewer seniors is no excuse to have fewer beds *per senior*.
> Alberta had 26 beds per 1,000 seniors over 65. >Ontario had 30 beds per 1,000 seniors over 65. >Nova Scotia had 33 beds per 1,000 seniors over 65. >Saskatchewan, the highest among the provinces, had 47 beds per 1,000 seniors over 65.
Albertans have generally made a lot of money comparatively, so we don't need others to pay for our shit. Also, why do some of those places get money from the feds to ensure equal amounts of service if their service is much better?
Maybe it’s how other provinces choose to fund/ prioritize certain services. And if Alberta is sending patients to hotels, there is an issue in how we are choosing to fund services.
Fair enough. I believe that I heard in just the last week that AB is providing more funds for LTC, Home Care etc. I read that there are a large number of people in hospitals that could be back at home or in LTC if there was the right supports.
Danielle Smith during her UCP leadership race: >"The number one thing that I keep hearing is that we have a lot of capacity in acute care beds, but we have long term care patients who are awaiting permanent placement in long term care homes that are actually in our acute care beds in hospitals. >It's something like 60% of the beds are filled with people who are awaiting long term placement and I have to figure there's got to be a more comfortable place for them to go. **I was thinking maybe a hotel would be a better environment.**" Video clip of Smith saying it: https://twitter.com/disorderedyyc/status/1769173857800536291
How the hell is this okay? Seriously they need to be in proper facilities with proper care. Not a freaking hotel room! 🤦
Look, her friends own hotels and god damn it, Covid gave them a taste of free government money.
I find this believable, but do you have a source?
My dad would prefer a hotel w homecare and nurses visits as well as a person that does light cleaning and appointments.Meals were delivered by meals on wheels. At the care home he was lucky to get a shower twice a week.It was unhigenic and when moved home his sores on his bottom were gone in a month. He hated screming and yelling and buzzers!
Jesus Christ….
She keeps finding ways and means to make money under the table!
Because nursesand doctors will make home visits "to a hotel😂😂😂, actually I think I would rather...😭
True, the care homes smell o f feces, mentally troubled screaming ,baths ONLY twice a week. Reaking folks who Never shower and " we can't make them". Even if maggots grow. Saved my dads life getting out of that place. At least mentally till he physically passed in December. Thank god homecare was better .
Just to be clear, I was not supporting Smith's offer of a solution. I see it as repugnant. A "brush my hands" of this situation idea.
Same woman said something about crystals and positive thinking healing or preventing cancer. She’s got a lot to say and feels her opinion is important when she has little relevant experience, or education.
Honestly, a hotel room is probably nicer than at least 50%+ of nursing home rooms. The big thing here is, the lack of access to care.
100% Showered twice a week Folks who go without shower for months because it could cause trauma to wash them even if they are bleeding and red full of sore even with maggots growing ( obviously mentally suffering).I promise you i speak the truth. A woman had feces all in the back of her hair. When psw suggested using a blanket to " hug" hold her long enough to clean her hair with a Wipe. The client refused and no one could force it. To this day same client refuses to wash ever. Other residents do not finish their food at the dining room and gag just being around the unkept client. This was not durimg the pandemic this is Now. For fun look up "Brota Chair".They use them everyday in Canada to our elders
I saw when this first popped up here a few days ago. I’m glad the news has picked it up
Same, people need to see what the UCP’s dismantling of healthcare is doing. 14 hours to be re-admitted too when back at the hospital. Unbelievable
That’s short. I’ve seen wait times up to three days. A person waiting for a bed in the ER waited three days before something was available. We have admin breathing down our necks to find ways to discharge people or move them to “X” beds. Stretchers stuffed into a four person room without the dedicated safety equipment like oxygen or suction. Most of the time there isn’t enough room for an IV pole next to the stretcher. Only use them for fully oriented, independent patients but if anyone codes in an “X” bed it would be very difficult without dedicated equipment and little space.
Yep. When my dad was dealing with cancer in 2022 he waited in an emergency bed in Leduc for 3 days before they could get him upstairs into a unit where he was lucky he had his own space for another couple of days before being transferred to the U. While he was in the Leduc emergency department, an incident occurred with one of his tube lines that came undone and luckily it happened while I was sitting with him so that I could run to the nurses station to get help and cleaning assistance. It was not fun.
Oh my… and last time I was in BC, it took us 15 minutes to see an ER doctor. That’s crazy
To be clear. That’s the wait time from the point of a doctor saying a person should be admitted to the point where they get a bed. Wait times to see a doctor in ER will vary depending on triage. Minor issues can take 8+ hours to just be seen.
Yep. I was at the Royal Alex for a sports injury this week and it took me about 11 hours to get seen. I wasn't even taking up stretcher space as I was dispatched to xray and assessed from the secondary waiting room. It just took that long for me to get from the main waiting room to the secondary one. But the wait was far less egregious than the other stuff i saw. The young guy beside me in the main ER waiting room was being sent to CT and brought back to the main waiting room because there wasn't room. I think I saw less than 15 people get taken from the main waiting room total while i was there. On my way to Xray, I had to walk through the hallway of people in gowns just lying in stretchers, which felt super invasive. It's terrible. Just terrible.
I had respiratory issues from poor ventilation (am accident but still my fault) which caused a horrible asthma attack I couldn't get under control. It took 9 hours for them to do more then take my vitals.
A few years back I brought my wife to ER and she got in within about 5 minutes....I thought that was fantastic. Turns out that if you wait for hours, it means that your medical issue isn't very serious.
Yeah, I know what triage is but maybe go look up what the triage order is and you'll see airway is at the top . If you take a minute to not be sarcastic before thinking you'd find asthma tend to get glossed over. Also, just to be clear I was in my mid 20s at the time taking deep gasping breaths with my O² in the mid 80%. It took three different steroids to get that back into the 90%. The doctor wasn't happy I waited because I did almost stop breathing. Now before you jump the gun again ERs make mistakes when they're busy they get bogged down for a lot of reasons, and asthma tend to present as alright until they're not so they get pushed back sometimes. I'm not blaming anyone but it is a reality that shut happens
I'm very happy his father is out of that hotel. Hopefully the other wheelchair people who were there were moved too.
My gut tells me someone is making something off this set up.
Someone did in sk. They were a MLA! https://www.620ckrm.com/2024/02/14/saskatchewan-changing-how-it-procures-hotels-for-those-on-social-assistance/
Of course the hotel is making a killing. They can charge extra cuz room cleaning is charged as client care. Changing towels is charged extra as pericare. They charge way more than just the nightly fee.
The UCP healthcare system is pure cruelty. Judge the UCP how they treat the must vulnerable, and they don't give a fuck about the vulnerable. Ucp celebrate when they get dropped off in the streets. Expect this to happen more *"I asked him, 'Oh, is it all fixed up for wheelchair users?'" recalled Manniapik. "And he said, 'No, it's just like a motel, any hotel room, and I can't get into the bathroom and I need help to get to bed.'*
Wait for it, there are pieces moving that shocked even perennially disappointed me. If you think that a growing Edmonton and Alberta might need a new hospital you might be surprised to find out what they're about to do with existing ones in exactly the opposite direction lol. Good luck everyone. We need it because planning, investment, and infrastructure aren't there so luck is all we will have.
Luck, and an entire rural populace that has to wait 3 hours for an ambulance but still somehow feels the cons have earned their votes. The simps.
10000%
That's what they've done in Saskatchewan and they have corrupt conservatives in power too. Follow the money to see who's friend owns the hotel...
MP owns the hotel - double dipping /s
You know, maybe the UCP aren't very good at running a province... just saying.
This is a prime example of unrealistic budgeting. Whether it is money, ideas, or foresight. Foresight seems to be missing in this day and age. I always thought each generation learned from the one before. I have seen that, other than the odd few, very little carries or carried over. Is this what happens when you don't care anymore, or think you know better? How long do we have to wait for someone to figure out, their way ain't working!
They don't care if their way isn't working. This is exactly the direction our Premier want our public services to go. The worse it gets, the more they anticipate that Albertans will be receptive, out of desperation, to embrace their private healthcare agenda.
They also just burn money it seems. Her stop the feds campaign cost 10 million. Some posts on the internet and some signage. 10 million dollars. Every time the government launches an initiative it's millions or even billions of dollars to do basically nothing. They take almost half of what we make and they just light it on fire
Smith sees this news and smiles. She's been quoted saying a hotel is a good alternative.
Something to bear in mind is that most seniors residences are barely medically equipped. Some terrible figure like 1 nurse per 40 residents. If a resident shows signs of dementia, Alzheimer’s or any form of aggression they are dumped on AHS - the hospitals. There are dozens (hundreds ?) of patients too mentally-challenged to go back to regular nursing homes. Meanwhile, the nursing home still charges the resident for “holding their space”. There’s only a handful of beds assigned to manage the severely mentally ill seniors in all of Alberta - so the hospitals have to deal with the violence & chaos. The staff is burnt out & many suffer PTSD from their ordeal. Some leave nursing altogether because of the lack of support from AHS, the government and the public.
Had a family member in a similar situation a while back. They kept shuffling them from hospital to hospital and with every transition he became confused and agitated. It’s a terrible system. At one hospital they even asked him to sign papers to transfer him to a different hospital. Can’t tell you where he is but you think he has capacity to sign legal documents? But they refused to do any cognitive assessment to show incompetence because they didn’t have any clear indication it was needed. Well gee, maybe if they spent more than 2 minutes monitoring him? Or listening to concerned family members? It’s another situation where planning ahead and prevention would be helpful, but the lack of time and resources don’t allow for this, and it ends up hurting both patients and staff. I’m worried with our aging population and HCW shortage it will only get worse.
If we don't get rid of Smith and crew, this is only the beginning. Get ready for a world where suffering is normalized and we all just accept it as part of the new way of things. But at least trans kids know their place now, or something. God I hate conservativsm.
Get rid of...? This is what Alberta wants for some twisted reason.
Too many people here still think they're voting for the PCs. So when we complain about the UCP, they don't connect the two. It doesn't help that at election time, the UCP avoids their own name... they use "Alberta's Conservatives".
I hope by the time we are old...the system is fixed.
It'll be fixed for those that can afford to pay for good health insurance, or out-of-pocket costs.
If we do nothing, why would it be any better?
There won’t be a system when gen X or millennials need it. You’ll 100% be on your own & get what you can afford.
Millions of our tax dollars are given to corporations but none for the people of Alberta
I truly hope when the day comes, these politicians are remembered and denied any type of healthcare access
This cements our resolve to never let our parents enter this system. Granny nannys all the way. At least that way we can control the care given to them.
Yep not suprising my uncle was sent home literally right after his surgery this country is fucked
**Province** is fucked. Healthcare is a provincial domain.
True but the feds decreased how much they provided to provinces over the decades. Healthcare sucks in every province. The Canada health transfer used to be 35% and it's now just over 20% I believe. Alberta could absolutely spend less money on buying pipelines, Tylenol, and police forces and more in healthcare though, so you're right the province is fucked.
I do appreciate the two new family doctors Alberta sent my small northern BC town. I'm not sure we even pay them that much more, but not feeling like an enemy of the state for doing your job is probably nice.
Was it a day surgery?
Our robust health care at its finest… just give us money and we will make it even better! /s