New home care provider won't cook meals: user

SHAWN McCLOSKEY // PHOTO: JOHN LUCAS, Edmonton Journal

Fourteen residents residents with physical disabilities of  Abby Road Co-Op in Edmonton are very tense as they prepare for a new home care provider. Their concerns range from Revera, the new care provider, not cooking meals to not providing 24-hour care to people with high needs. Resident Shawn McCloskey emailed Tait Talk with his concerns.

McCloskey says Revera has already made it clear they would warm up frozen or microwavable dinners. But not cook for residents, Revera says it’s “industry standards” and their staff is not trained to know temperatures. If Revera staff cooks something and a resident gets sick the are liable. But McCloskey says that’s only one issue. By only heating up meals, who will prepare them in the first place? Family members? What if a resident doesn’t have a family member in Edmonton. “What if we eat food that needs to be prepared but not warmed up - particularly at breakfast and lunch? Do we go without food? Ultimately what this will do is make us more dependent on other people.”

McCloskey goes on to say Revera is “implicitly acknowledging that the members of Abby Road are losing the right to control their home care and thereby their own lives. “As it stands, I am perfectly capable of knowing when my burgers are grilled enough, my potatoes baked enough and my vegetables steamed enough,” he says. But the mistake Alberta Health Services made by giving the home care contract to Revera, says McCloskey, is this: “Givng away my right to decide these things. This is not about food exactly. The larger issue here is that, with Revera, we are unable to determine what is best for ourselves.”

NEXT@NOON: PART 2 – NO MORE 24-HOUR CARE AT ABBY ROAD

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