Why I Hate IHA - Part 3

Like it or not, there's a lot of lies and deception swirling around the offices of many who get pay cheques from IHA. And while I have tried very hard not to blame the staff, the workers who are forced to deliver health care services within a failing system, sometimes they slip up.

My story goes back to the Rutland care facility my mother found herself in as a result of the simply stupid 'first available bed' protocol. Check an earlier post on this website for details on that issue. The Rutland facility was in the process of 're-branding' with a completely new name and identity. Typically a 're-branding' of any kind is to give the product a fresh, new start possibly due to, say, lagging sales or in many cases it's to push forward from a past best left behind. My first red flag with the 're-branding' and once I did some research on the facility I uncovered some information that had me just a bit suspicious of what was going on there.

When my mother was first placed in the Rutland facility we were told by someone in the middle somewhere of IHA's 'middle management' that she was on a waiting list for proper placement. I have since forgotten the exact location, but I seem to recall she was #35 or #38 on this list. This was in December 2008.

Rather than getting into extreme detail here, my brother and I kept pushing for Mom to be moved higher on that list as we started identifying problems with her placement. The most significant one to us (as I've mentioned in a previous post) was that she was in a facility for dementia patients and she did not have dementia.

We had a series of meetings with various levels of IHA personnel at the facility level and with the level just above them. At one point we were told at a meeting our efforts had pushed Mom up the list. Again, I forget exactly where, but I seem to recall we got her somewhere above #12. During a couple of our meetings we were clearly told that it was very unusual to see family members so actively involved as the typical situation is a senior is put in a 'home' by family and forgotten. This was not the case with our mother and it showed me that the IHA 'manual' could not address this as many of the meetings were just reviews of previous meetings with little resolution. In fact, it was my brother and I who came up with most of the ideas.

Then months into this we had another meeting with the level above the facility operators where we once again pressed for our mother to move up the waiting list. It was at this meeting we were told there was no such thing as a waiting list.

To this day I wonder if this was their way of penalizing us for being so actively involved as advocates for our mother. Or was it that in the IHA Manual chapter labelled, "What To Do After First Bed Available Placement" there were no further instructions.

I say this because someone working at the facility did mention to me once that 'most' seniors end up staying at their 'first available bed' placement. I wonder if that's because the family decided to let IHA warehouse their loved one or if the family just gave up trying to change the situation after hitting so many IHA roadblocks.