‘The management clearly was lacking leadership,’ Jean-Pierre Gariépy says
Martin C. Barry
The former chief of the Laval Police Department, whose wife was recently transferred to CHSLD Sainte-Dorothée to recover from a brain aneurysm, suggested last week that management at the long-term care facility was incompetent, after his wife and many other residents became infected with the COVID-19 virus.
Not told, he said
Jean-Pierre Gariépy was the head of the Laval Police for 15 years up to the end of 2013 when he retired. He said in a broadcast interview with 98.5 Montreal’s Paul Arcand that his wife, Louise Bourgeois, was hospitalized at Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur in Montreal before being transferred to CHSLD Sainte-Dorothée in western Laval in late March.
“I didn’t know at the time that there were patients there who were at risk,” he told Arcand, while adding that he found out only later that she was transferred after at least one resident was known to be infected with COVID-19.
‘Incompetence’
“She became infected soon after her arrival,” he said. “The transmission took place stage by stage, through an employee who was badly prepared and badly protected. The management clearly was lacking leadership.
“They should have given out precise directives to the staff, which was not the case. They even forced attendants to stay at work despite the fact they were sick. This is appalling incompetence.”
Possible class-action
Gariépy maintained during the interview that management at the CHSLD appeared to be improvising at virtually every stage during the developing COVID-19 crisis. He suggested they didn’t seem to know what they were doing while moving infected residents into areas adjacent to where healthy residents were quartered.
“Did they have a plan for dealing with an outbreak?” he said. “Plans for separating people by floors or by sectors? Did they have facial masks, or appropriate protective gloves?” He said he was seriously considering whether to launch a class-action lawsuit in conjunction with other CHSLD Sainte-Dorothée residents or their relatives.
Martin C. Barry, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter for the Laval News, marty@newsfirst.ca
