'Confusion' delayed N.B.'s review of response to COVID in special care homes

New Brunswick's Department of Social Development is facing questions about whether it has made any improvements to its pandemic planning now as six nursing homes go through new COVID-19 outbreaks.

Departmental officials acknowledged to a committee of MLAs on Tuesday that there's been no internal review of how it handled the pandemic in special care homes because of what the deputy minister called "confusion."

Jim Mehan also said no protective measures are in place now because Public Health has not recommended any.

"What lessons have you learned? It doesn't seem like you've applied any right now," Green Leader David Coon told him during a meeting of the legislature's public accounts committee.

"We don't want avoidable deaths occurring in our long-term-care sector, I'm sure you would agree. We don't want avoidable suffering from serious cases of COVID occurring if they can be avoided." 

Long-term care homes were one of the province's most vulnerable sectors during the height of the pandemic, and Coon warned Tuesday that new variants of the virus could lead to spikes in cases again.

Mehan said six nursing homes and four special-care homes in the province now have outbreaks.

Responding to questions from Coon, the deputy minister said there are no masking or vaccination requirements for staff and no restrictions on them working in more than one facility, even if one has an outbreak.

The department was appearing at the committee to answer questions about a report by Auditor-General Paul Martin that concluded it didn't adequately prepare nursing homes for the pandemic.

That included a lack of personal protective equipment, or PPE, for staff to wear so they could avoid transmitting the virus.

Martin also found that recommendations from a review of the province's response to the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 were never adopted as part of a new pandemic plan.

Mehan told MLAs that one of those recommendations was for the department to keep an emergency stockpile of PPE and it did create one. 

"Unfortunately the attention — making sure the stockpile was rotated and expired good were removed — did not happen, so when the pandemic happened, a lot of the PPE was expired," he said.

Martin's audit focused only on nursing homes, not other facilities such as special care homes.