Katherine Ellis came home from the hospital in January, but her partner says she still doesn’t have home care
After being diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer last month, Katherine Ellis decided to come home for palliative care. She thought she’d be comfortable spending her last days surrounded by her family.
Instead, her partner of 10 years said, the 62-year-old woman in Winnipeg has been sleeping in the same sheets for weeks and has only had a sponge bath because the help she was promised never came.
“Despite making a lot of promises, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority hasn’t been able to send relief workers or home care workers,” Eric De Schepper, 58, said on Thursday.
De Schepper said that means he is the only one taking care of his common-law wife, even though he can’t get her out of bed or give her a full bath on his own. This has been going on for almost five weeks.
He said he’s asked their palliative care coordinator every week for the couple of days of home care they were supposed to get and for a couple of half days of respite work so he can take a break, but they don’t have the money to send workers.
“I want to ask and challenge everyone: how would you feel if you were treated like that for four weeks?” “It’s just degrading and dehumanizing,” De Schepper said.
He called a cancer support group, which sent someone to Ellis’s house on Wednesday to bathe and take care of him for a few hours. However, De Schepper said that this kind of help isn’t enough. Even so, that day changed everything for his partner.
He said, “She was smiling, which was something I hadn’t seen in a long time.” “But the system as a whole, the regional health authority, has failed in every way.”
Staffing failure: unio
The head of the union that represents more than 14,000 health care support workers in the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and Shared Health says she wouldn’t disagree with De Schepper.
In an interview on Thursday, Debbie Boissonneault, president of CUPE Local 204, said, “I think this government has failed people with the health care system by not having enough people to care for people at home.”
As a health-care aide, Boissonneault has been with families when a loved one was dying, and she says it’s hard on people even at the best of times.
“Everyone has a right to health care, and I think it’s important at this time for someone to be in their own home,” she said, adding that she hopes De Schepper gets the help she needs.
A spokesperson for the WRHA said that there is still a shortage of home care workers and that the authority knows how important it is to meet the needs of people in palliative care.
In an email sent Thursday, the spokesperson said that the WRHA is making it a priority to fill services as soon as possible to help those patients and their families stay at home.
Action came ‘way too late
Ellis drove for Winnipeg Transit for about 15 years before she left on short-term disability because of health problems, according to De Schepper.
She was told she had cancer in November, but the last time she went to the hospital was in December, when she went into diabetic shock and had to be rushed to the emergency room.
De Schepper said she was told that surgery wouldn’t be an option and that chemotherapy wouldn’t help her live longer at that point, so Ellis decided not to do either.
At first, De Schepper was taking care of his partner while working as a school bus driver, but this month he realized he would have to take a leave of absence and apply for employment insurance caregiving benefits so he could give his partner the best care possible.
During an interview on Thursday, De Schepper said that the WRHA called him to tell him that they had finally found a relief worker for him. But he said Ellis probably only has one or two weeks left to live. That wasn’t much of a comfort, and it didn’t solve the problem of who would care for Ellis at home.
“The only thing we can do for her now as a family and as her caregiver is to make sure she’s comfortable, pain-free, and surrounded by her family,” he said, referring to her three sons.
“It’s way too late for anything to happen now.”
Even though De Schepper knows Ellis’s illness means they won’t be able to spend their retirement together traveling the world as they had planned, he says the worst part has been how they were treated by the health care system that was supposed to help them.
“In her last hours of need, the system failed her badly,” he said.
De Schepper said he wants to say something in case it helps someone else change their situation.
“This is my hope: that I’m this one guy standing on top of a mountain and throwing a pebble, which will eventually cause an avalanche,” he said.