REGINA -- A Regina woman is raising concerns about outbreak preparedness at Santa Maria Senior Citizen’s Home after her father who lived at the facility died due to COVID-19.
Beverley Hartnell last saw and spoke with her father, Bernard, a day before he died from COVID-19 at 88 years old.
"He didn’t open his eyes and he had on an oxygen mask. So it was nice to be there, but I couldn’t get close, I wanted to hug him," Hartnell said.
Hartnell tested positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 26 and 16 days later, he became the fourth resident to die from COVID-19 at Santa Maria.
There have now been 13 deaths at the facility since the outbreak started on Dec. 17.
Hartnell said when she was alerted to the first case at the facility, she reached out to see what precautions were being taken to limit the spread.
"The floor that my father was on is a dementia unit where they wouldn’t keep a mask on, if you tell them to stay in their room, they wouldn’t understand that, so I knew it had some real specific challenges," she said.
Hartnell also shared her concerns about the set-up at Santa Maria in an email to the Ministry of Health, but did not receive a response until 18 days after sending the message.
"They said, 'We’re sorry to hear your father tested positive,' and they sent me some links to some websites that didn’t answer my questions," Hartnell said.
Santa Maria’s executive director Kelly Chessie told CTV News in a email that since the outbreak was declared, the Saskatchewan Health Authority has provided the facility’s nurses with training on point-of-care rapid testing, helped secure additional PPE and provided a mobile team of a physician, respiratory therapist and nurse with expertise in managing respiratory illnesses.
"We will continue to take every opportunity to make important changes and improvements as we learn together about what works best when fighting this virus and protecting our residents and staff," Chessie said.
Hartnell believes quicker action could have been taken to protect the residents after the first resident tested positive.
"They should have isolated that person immediately and they didn’t and that’s a problem," she said."The COVID physician and the team that he brought in, that didn’t happen fast enough, by that time, we had so many of [the residents] inter-mingling, it was too late."
According to Santa Maria, 28 residents and three staff members remain infected with COVID-19. There is a light at the end of the tunnel as 114 residents have now received their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine.
