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While there have been dozens of rule violations at Summerland Seniors Village over the last couple of years, problems there seem to have escalated since December, leading up to the management of the facility being taken over by Interior Health yesterday, Feb. 24.

An iNFOnews.ca story in January highlighted complaints and infractions at the home since July 2018 that included things like medications not being given and patients being left in bed late into the morning.

“The complaints Interior Health received about Summerland Seniors Village have largely been administrative issues resulting from site leadership turnover,” Courtney Zimmerman, corporate director for environmental public health and licensing for Interior Health, wrote in a Jan. 14 email to iNFOnews.ca. “New leadership has been in place since the fall of 2019 to ensure the organization meets its administrative requirements.”

Despite the actions taken by Interior Health, problems continued and seemed to grow in severity.  A Feb. 10 routine inspection catalogued more than a dozen infractions before yesterday’s actions.

Some of the most serious amongst those were medications not being consistently administered or missed, staff sleeping on the job and, in one case, a sharp metal nail file and disposable razor left in a patient’s bathroom within the locked dementia unit.

Many of the violations relate to record keeping but there were numerous other violations as well, such as:

• Contract employees only got one shift for training when five are required.
• No check on whether employees got the flu vaccine. If they don’t get it, they’re supposed to wear masks.
• Cases of “neglect of persons in care.”
• Managers were only working day shifts, Mondays through Fridays so there was “no supervision on evenings, nights or weekend.”
• Staff was only to call on-call managers for “natural disasters, elevator issues, death of a resident or any colour codes called.”
• Patients’ immunization screening not consistently documented for tetanus, diphtheria and pneumovax vaccines.
• A razor, toothbrush and hair brushes that may have been used by more than one person.
• No system is in place for checking that food is kept at proper temperatures in personal fridges.
• Employees leaving patients in common areas without them being checked every 15 minutes, as required.
• Cases where changes in patients’ conditions were not monitored or followed up on.
• One patient’s weight dropped by 4.7 kg one month and there was no indication that anyone paid any attention to it.
• Multiple patients having bruising to their upper arms over a four-month period that weren’t reported to management and, therefore, not investigated.

The full report can be seen here.

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