While it appears cases are plateauing or trending downward in the Pontiac and across the province, it’s a good time to assess some of the response to this third wave.
Early on in this public health disaster, there were plenty of
celebrations of front-line health care workers, everything from parades to people banging pots and pans at certain times of the evening. Those gestures have largely fallen by the wayside as this ordeal dragged on over a year, but the workers are still there, risking their health to protect the general public. Especially in light of this outbreak at the hospital, they can’t get enough praise for their sacrifices.
The ones that are brave enough to speak with the media about the situation on the ground, at great risk to their careers, deserve a tip of the cap as well. The only way positive change can occur is if the public can learn the truth.
However, despite the incredible work of the troops on the ground, public health guidelines are a political quagmire, with a vast number of competing interests, bureaucratic sluggishness and jurisdictional spats.
According to several sources that spoke to THE EQUITY, there are patients in the hospital awaiting transfer to a long-term care bed who were not vaccinated until late last month, despite being eligible for quite some time. Unless they were mobile and had family to take them to get vaccinated in Campbell’s Bay, they were out of luck.
Their cases are remarkably similar to that of a Gatineau man, whose ordeal was chronicled in two shocking stories by Justine Mercier in Le Droit on April 25 and 26.
Émile Brazeau, a 93 year-old man with asthma was in the short-term care ward at the Wakefield Hospital from late November 2020 until early March while he waited for a long-term care bed. Despite being extremely high risk for COVID complications, he was not vaccinated during his stay there. He also wasn’t immediately vaccinated at the private care home in Gatineau that he eventually moved into.
Brazeau was lucky that his family are strong advocates for him, as they appealed directly to Quebec’s Health Minister Christian Dubé with two letters sent on April 12 and 19, but didn’t receive any response. It wasn’t until Mercier’s story came out on April 25 that the minister publically responded and requested that the regional health authority, CISSSO, remedy the situation.
It’s interesting that the CISSSO started vaccinating those waiting in the hospital for a long-term care bed on April 22, right before this bureaucratic oversight was made public. Was this the timeline they had planned all along or did they need some prodding before addressing such a glaring issue?
These enormous organizations are not perfect, they’re staffed by people after all and people make mistakes. However, in order for there to be public trust in the health care system and the government more broadly, there needs to be transparency, accountability for the choices that are made, and an acknowledgment when things go wrong.
Caleb Nickerson
