'It's very, very sad': Daughter says she was called to Victoria hospital to feed mother due to staffing shortage

Helen Bell got what she describes as an alarming phone call from a nurse at Victoria's Royal Jubilee Hospital on Monday, asking her family to feed her mother because the hospital was too short staffed to do so.

"They needed us to come in and feed my mother for breakfast, lunch and supper, if she was going to get fed today," said Bell on Monday.

Bell's mother, 87-year-old Margaret Mears, is in acute care at the hospital and is disabled. She's unable to use her hands right now to feed herself, so she relies on others to do that.

What’s more, her daughter says Mears has only been given one shower in the past month.

"You just think that those basic things of taking care of somebody—feeding them, cleaning them—should just be something we can take for granted in the hospital," said Bell.

Bell doesn't fault the staff at all, in fact she praises the nurse for doing the responsible thing by seeking help when it was needed.

She says it’s the system that’s stretched too thin by COVID, noting that staff's off work because they're sick, compounding the strain of approximately 1,000 patients in B.C. hospitals with COVID-19.

"Not only are (COVID patients) having a rough time themselves, they’re impacting other people that are in the hospital, and the hospital system is not very robust right now," said Bell.

Bell thinks the public needs to know just how fragile the health-care system is, and how big of an impact COVID-19 is having on the system.