N.B. woman bumped down nursing home waitlist due to hospital critical state protocol

After suffering two strokes, Shelley Petit’s mother was placed on the waitlist for a nursing home bed in New Brunswick last year. Petit says she received a promising call from a local nursing home just weeks ago, telling her they were almost ready to take her mom.

Her mother started making arrangements — packing and deciding what to sell and donate.

But then, another call.

“You could tell the woman that I had to speak to, she was like stumbling for words and she felt bad. And I said, ‘Let me see if I can help you out here. Yesterday's announcement by Minister [Jill] Green means Mom has lost her placement?’ She goes, ‘Yes,’” explained Petit in an interview with CTV Atlantic.

On Jan. 4, New Brunswick Social Development Minister Jill Green approved the Saint John Regional Hospital to enter a ‘critical state’ protocol: prioritizing its patients when nursing home beds become available. Usually nursing home admissions are made chronologically, but because of this mechanism, when any nursing home beds become available, people waiting at the SJRH get them first.

It happens when a hospital is overcapacity, both in its emergency department and acute care units, and when critical surgeries are being cancelled due to lack of beds.

It lasts for 30 days before being reassessed. The same protocol was approved for Fredericton’s Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital on Jan. 23.

And while people remain on the waitlist, it can mean some people are bumped further down the list.

Like Petit’s mother.

“She understands that the person who got her bed now has to pass on before she can get back to a nursing home bed. This was just 30 days is not accurate, is just a way for the government to make themselves feel better about shuffling people around,” she said.

Liberal leader Susan Holt can see it from both sides.

“It is heartbreaking to try and imagine what it would feel like to be waiting and waiting and finding yourself moving up a list and moving up a list and being told you're next and then being bumped,” she said. “At the same time, I can imagine how painful it is to live in a hospital waiting for a new home and a long-term care facility. And so we are in a very tough place.”

Holt believes the only way out is to take a real look at the long-term care system – and potentially overhaul it.

“These are these are tough policy choices that need to be made,” she said.

In the meantime, Petit says while her mother has home support workers who see her every day, she’s worried she’ll fall at some point and end up in hospital.

“My mom is not a number. My mom is not a piece of cattle that you can herd around. She is a human being that helped build up this province and worked hard all of her life and she deserves better now. She deserves to feel safe and happy,” she said.

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