To the editor,
Re: For-profit senior care homes spend less on staff, B.C. advocate says, Feb. 4.
I am a registered nurse with 42 years’ experience. In recent years I have become increasingly disturbed and angry as I’ve witnessed our health care system transformed for the benefit of private interests.
The recent report by B.C. Seniors Advocate Isobel Mackenzie confirms what those of us on the front line have long known, that the aim of for-profit care homes is to make money by cutting care. What does it say of our leaders and their communication experts that they continue to tout for-profit care and spread the lie that privatization serves our interests? The spinelessness, buck-passing and sheer ignorance of our elected politicians is unbelievable.
As any health professional understands, it’s sometimes necessary to scrub a wound for the best health outcome. Today, as a society we must scrub out the delusion that our political representatives will willingly challenge the status quo. Successive Liberal and NDP governments have shown greater loyalty to corporate interests than to our vulnerable elderly, and it’s up to us to hold them to account.
Compassion is the highest intelligence, encompassing intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual intelligence. We must uncover the dehumanizing wounds that are being inflicted on our defenceless elderly. We must remove the delusional infection that health care profiteering is okay. Where is the moral compass of our health administrators and their spin-doctors? Take the profit out of health care. Tending to the elderly is a calling to care, not a get-rich plan.
Eleanor Jenkins, Sechelt
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