Because nursing homes fall under provincial and territorial jurisdiction, there is no national data available. And to make matters even more challenging, within many jurisdictions such as Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, nursing homes are run by regional health authorities which keep their own data to varying degrees of efficiency. This means that it’s extremely difficult to paint a coherent, provincial and national picture when it comes to problems besetting nursing homes, despite calls from advocates for a national dialogue on problems such as violence, abuse, neglect and over-medication of seniors in facilities that are supposed to take care of them.
With the lack of any national sets of data, CBC News had to begin from scratch.
Thus far, what we have complied in the charts and numbers that you’ll see on this web site is the beginning of our attempt to give Canadians a sense of what’s happening in nursing homes across the country.
For instance, in Ontario, we have created a graph using statistics from the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s unusual occurrence reports. The database that contains those reports tracks many other incidents such as possible over-medication, hospitalization, fraud and disease outbreak. It would have been nice to analyze trends in those categories, but we are still fighting for the data. For now we can only tell you about one trend: violence.
The story is the same in other jurisdictions. In B.C., the health authorities claim they don’t keep databases. So if we want to obtain statistics, officials with the authorities have to go into each inspection report and pull out the relevant data. This is a time-consuming and costly exercise to find and present data to which the public should have access. We wonder what those authorities would do if they had to pull together an analysis for a cabinet minister responding to a crisis.
To get a fuller picture of the problem of violence, we have also dipped into other databases that have been collected from previous CBC News investigations into drug and workplace safety. For instance, in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario, we were able to track the number of inspections ministries of labour conducted in nursing homes. Unlike inspections by ministries of health, labour inspections are designed to make the workplaces safe for staff. But as we have learned thus far, violent incidents involving residents on staff are on the rise in many jurisdictions.
As well, we’ve been able to dip back into some of our databases that track compensation claims. Again, in B.C., we can see that the number of compensation claims for “acts of violence” and “acts of force” have been rising for a six-year period, beginning in 2000.
To get a handle on the recurring problem of over-medication, we have updated Health Canada’s adverse drug reaction database, and taken steps to track the sale of drugs that the department warned seniors and their doctors about in the spring of 2005 after our series Prescribed to Death. Not surprisingly, that warning failed to make a difference.
So perusing our data will be more like a connect-the-dot exercise. But the picture of violence in nursing homes is clear. We will add more detail to that picture as we continue to collect data.
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AUDIO
- The problem of aggression in nursing homes. (Runs 6:19)
- David McKie reports on the increase in nursing home violence in Ontario (Runs 2:10)
- Sandra Bartlett reports that violence statistics are rising across the country (Runs 2:19)
- Despite beefed up inspections, violence continues to grow at nursing home, with many incidents 'off the books.' Runs 2:15
- The risk of injury to patients often increases inside nursing home facilities. (Runs 2:22)
- Sandra Bartlett reports that the people who have the most contact with needy patients have little training. (Runs 4:47)
- Families face a daunting task when deciding on a nursing home for aging parents. (Runs 5:24)