There are more than 1,400 pages and 91 recommendations in the official report on the crimes of serial-killer nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer, but one clear message: if you have a loved one in long-term care in Ontario, you better keep a close watch on them, because the system sure won’t.
In fact, if there’s anything you can do to keep them out of it — anything — you should give it very careful consideration. Wettlaufer murdered eight elderly people over nine years, and nobody noticed, or did anything about it. Rather, great effort went into keeping her employed. And, according to Justice Eileen Gillese, who headed the inquiry, it’s nobody’s fault. Not anyone she wants to mention, anyway, because, she says, it wouldn’t solve anything and would be unfair to those who kept her operating within the system, thinking she was just a lousy nurse rather than a killer.
It’s the system that’s at fault, Gillese says, and it’s the system that should be fixed, not the people who work in it. There’s probably a lot of truth in this, but it does nothing to quell the nerves of Ontarians who entrust their elderly to the care of those who are supposed to keep them safe — and hopefully not murder them — but is so hopeless, decrepit, broken-down and distracted that people can be bumped off with regularity and get away with it for almost a decade, and potentially forever, unless they decide, as Wettlaufer did, to turn herself in.
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See Also:
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(2) Public appointments should not be pot of gold for PC insiders
(3) Tory, Ford disagree on need for handgun ban
(4) Latest CAMH escapee walked away from facility last month
(5) Average family tax bill keeps growing and growing and growing
