The Albo Family/Vigil & Formation of SPCS
In August 2006 the Trail Health Watch group joined with other concerned Trail and area citizens to form the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Seniors (SPCS) in answer to public meetings and demonstrations after the in-care deaths of Frances and Alfred Albo. (See website under ‘About Us’.) The society name was changed in 2014 to Society for the Protection and Care of Seniors.
Fannie (Frances) Albo was a survivor. She endured 3 different bouts of cancer over a 45-year period, living to the enviable age of 91. She had been in hospital for almost a month after a fall while at home, when her husband was also in hospital with an extreme back injury. It turned out her problems resulted from fluid accumulation… it turns out that the last time daily pills were purchased, the druggist had forgotten to include her water pills/diuretics --- that over-sight caused Fannie’s fluid-build-up, hence the fall and subsequent hospital stay…!
At home, she had a home support worker only once a day, but while in hospital, Fannie was weakening, unable to return home and her son was told there were no empty residential beds locally. (At the time, family counted 19 elderly people seemingly waiting in hospital for care home placement.) She’d have to be temporarily transferred to Grand Forks. But meantime she was declining; family had not realized hospital staff doesn’t feed anyone not eating. (Food trays get returned with no record of whether the meal was consumed.) Her son told an office worker that his mother was not in shape for the proposed move to Grand Forks but the employee got angry at his tone of voice. She proceeded to order the transfer, but the family doctor was out of town so a ‘locum’ was contacted by phone and without ever meeting the ‘patient’ --- permission to move her was granted --- no physical examination having been made!
IHA separated her from her husband of 69 years and her family. While in Trail hospital she was actually dying, and could have transferred from her acute hospital bed to a then empty RESPITE BED in Poplar Ridge, Trail hospital’s Extended Care. If she’d been moved to it, her husband could have visited by wheelchair. Instead, when they rolled her stretcher into his room so he and her son could say ‘good-bye’, they said “Mary, say good bye to your husband…” her name was Fannie! … they’d even called her by the wrong name! That horrible scene was the last either saw of her --- she died, totally alone, in Grand Forks, only 45 hours after being transferred.
While the ambulance was on its way to Grand Forks, staff phoned to get the family’s wishes re: “do not resuscitate orders, etc”. All this should have been EXPLAINED to the family in a meeting before any transfer takes place. Instead answers were given by phone and then hospital staff went to her husband in his hospital bed, for a signature!
Her husband Alfred died in hospital 10 days after news of his wife’s death; his doctor just examined him as ‘fit to go home’ but hours later Alfie died, at which point the doctor described it as from a broken heart.
The nationwide outrage of the separation of this couple (months short of their 70th anniversary) caused the BC government to appoint Dr. Ballem and Martin McMahon to address the health care issues and make recommendations.
Seeing the obvious area need, citizens rallied to try and save a former residential care home, Kiro Manor, from being turned into an office building for IHA. SPCS suggested re-opening it as a Transition Unit, proposing: 6 palliative beds, 5 respite, 1 urgent assessment and 10 transition beds. An experienced cost analyst and people with backgrounds in engineering volunteered and were appointed by SPCS to do a fair and open feasibility comparison of combining half the IHA Wellness/Office with a 22 Bed Transition Unit proposed by the community for Kiro Manor, using standard costing procedures.
The government representatives had recommended: that additional transition beds be opened in the KBH service area. The purpose of these beds was to offer immediate strategies to relieve the exigencies arising from the acute, in-patient pressures. Also, that additional resources and spending be committed to further develop and enhance the range of community resources and services, particularly in the area of palliative care.
In a news release March 1, 2006, then Minister of Health George Abbott, stated that more transition and palliative beds would be established in Trail. It hasn’t happened. The SPCS Transition Unit would have been an answer for all the recommendations; and in an appropriate, economically feasible, already existing facility.
IHA turned down SPCS’s Transition Unit proposal and claimed hundreds of hours of IHA employee time were spent investigating the proposal. However, they had been proceeding with their own plans to change Kiro into Wellness Centre offices. (Dates on architect drawings for Wellness Centre showed IHA’s planning contined during pretended consideration of SPCS’s Transition Unit). At the time, SPCS Feasibility Committee member, Peter Van Iersel said “It is rather galling to think that all this tax-payer money, spent by tax-payer-funded staff on the "hundreds of staff-hours assisting the SPCS in their study" was for nothing more than to lay a smokescreen to hide the real IHA intentions and activities from the public”.
Instead of receiving the increases promised, the Trail area lost resources and contracted down the palliative services that were available prior to Dr. Ballem’s report. Cuts to local Hospice funding and lack of beds, has seen area palliative patients housed in hospital wards instead of private rooms.
SPCS hosts an annual Lost Services Vigil on hospital grounds February 19th. Purpose of vigil is to remember 2006 when the Albo family found no care bed available locally and Frances Albo was transferred to Grand Forks, only to die, alone, two days later, on Feb. 19.
Locally, in 2002 there was a dramatic loss of residential care beds with the closure of KIRO manor and Mater Misericordiae. The intent was to instead introduce enhanced services in supporting seniors to remain in their homes longer. There was development of Silver City Gardens (supportive housing) and Rosewood Village (subsidized assisted living and complex care). However, support has not kept pace with the increased demands of our aging population.
Unfortunately, concerns remain regarding seniors’ care and how it is delivered not only in the Greater Trail community, but throughout Interior Health and province wide. The focus of SPCS continues to be addressing the following ‘Lost Services’ concerns:
- Home Support services not meeting the full needs of clients; hours of service provided don’t necessarily meet the need to support clients in their homes.
- Early discharge of seniors from acute care with inadequate publicly-funded Home Support being provided to meet the individual's safety and health needs
- Home Support now funded by client on a sliding scale and there is an increased expectation by IHA for seniors to supplement the few Home Support hours with privately- funded services and increased reliance on family/friends to meet their care needs, often to the detriment of their own health and well-being.
- Some seniors are being moved out of their home community in Greater Trail area to temporary placements in New Denver and Grand Forks causing hardship of travel for family.
CHOICES:
a.) accepting the first available bed
b.) going into a privately-paid residential bed which can cost from $3,000 to $5,000.00 a month
c.) returning home while receiving some Home Support and family is left to pick up the additional 24 hour care and/or hire
support from a private- pay agency
d.) paying over $1,300.00 per day for each additional day spent occupying an acute care bed
Frances married Alfred Albo in 1936. The possibility that this couple would have celebrated their 70th anniversary in just a few months was cruelly denied them. Would it have happened? We don’t know, but the opportunity was denied by the health system that failed these two seniors.