Giving families more voice could help cut nursing home abuse, says student

A gerontology student, who is herself approaching 60, says more needs to be done to improve care in Nova Scotia nursing homes and greater attention should be paid to mandatory "family councils."

"I have heard that some facilities simply just do not have them," said Anne Gillies, a Mount Saint Vincent University master's student researching the role of family councils in long-term care facilities in Nova Scotia.

The government defines a family council as "a forum for families to have a voice in decisions that affect them and their loved ones and to improve the quality of residents' lives."

As of April 2016, all nursing homes are required to have one in order to be licensed by the province.

Gillies said she believes family councils, when they function properly, can give relatives a unified voice and help decrease the kind of abuse uncovered in a recent CBC News investigation.

"The family council is meant to be more of a collective activity where people get together to look collectively at what's happening across the facility," she said.

Josie Ryan, executive director of long-term care for Northwood, said the continuing care organization's three facilities used to have family councils but don't anymore because it became difficult to get families to participate.  

"Slowly, we were unable to attract new family council members so we had people on council that no longer had residents living in the facilities," said Ryan.

She points out Northwood has other forms of engagement, like surveys and family nights, and she's working toward establishing an advisory council that would have appointed family members.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health said any nursing home found to be without a family council is required to put one in place as a condition of their licence. But the department has not yet disclosed the number found to be without one during just completed annual inspections. 

Regardless, Gillies said families need more organized voice.

"I'm really, really dedicated to the idea that we still need to do a lot of improvements in nursing homes. I mean, I may be in one in a very few years," she said, "and I really would hope that the quality of life and the quality of care that I would experience in a nursing home would be somewhat better than what I know has taken place in nursing homes up to now."