Hamilton nursing home, warned in March after a 13-hour blackout, fined for poor wound care

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A Hamilton nursing home, which was warned in March by regulators after its residents were subjected to a 13-hour power outage, has been fined $5,500 for repeatedly failing to provide proper care for bed sores and other skin wounds.

The Ontario Ministry of Long-Term Care fined the home, the Blackadar Continuing Care Centre, for contravening the province’s wound-care rules over the past three years. Open wounds and bed sores, also known as pressure ulcers, can result from a person being left in one position for too long. If improperly treated, they can lead to deep, painful infections.

Five residents, including one with multiple wounds, did not have weekly assessments by a registered nurse at Blackadar, according to a March 22 inspection report, which was recently posted on the Ministry’s website. One of those residents went without an assessment for 13 weeks, the report says.

The report does not contain any details about the five residents. A source with knowledge of the investigation told The Globe and Mail that one of the five residents had died. A copy of the death certificate for that person, obtained by The Globe, identifies their immediate cause of death as osteomyelitis, a bone infection. The certificate also lists chronic calcaneal wounds (heel ulcers) and vascular disease as contributing causes. The Globe is not identifying the source because they were not authorized to speak about the matter.

Amit Arya, a palliative care doctor who works in nursing homes in the Greater Toronto Area, said he was “quite appalled and shocked” when he read the inspection report at The Globe’s request. He said it is crucially important to monitor the skin of elderly people in nursing homes routinely, because they often have mobility issues.

“They are spending most of their day perhaps in bed or in a wheelchair,” he said. “That’s really how bed sores develop.”

The ministry has ordered the home to ensure that its registered nursing staff check residents’ skin tears or wounds at least once a week.

Blackadar is managed by Extendicare, one of Canada’s largest for-profit nursing home chains. Extendicare has complied with the order and put in place “an action plan to support Blackadar in addressing care quality issues,” Laura Gallant, an Extendicare spokesperson, said in an e-mail.

“We view inspection findings as learning opportunities to improve processes,” she said, adding that the administrator at the home has resigned and new leadership has been hired. Ms. Gallant declined to respond to questions about the resident who died, citing privacy issues.

The ministry’s findings are the latest controversy for the 80-bed nursing home. A Globe investigation last month found that Blackadar has contravened Ontario’s long-term care legislation with impunity. The violations include three power failures lasting more than five hours over the past 2½ years, among them the 13-hour outage in December.

In February, the ministry ordered the home to ensure that it has a generator powerful enough to maintain a number of services, including its heating system, residents’ call bells, emergency lighting and life-support equipment. Blackadar has until June 30 to comply.

For the ministry’s March inspection report, three inspectors spent 29 days at the home in January, February and early March.

Blackadar faces an uncertain future. The nursing home was family-owned for more than four decades, and began to be managed by Extendicare in 2012. In November, 2020, the Blackadar family sold its shares in both the nursing home and a retirement residence on the same Creighton Road property for $3.7-million to Hamid Hakimi, chief executive officer of residential real estate developer Elite Developments, and Haidar Sakhi, CEO of building maintenance services company H&S Holdings.

The new owners surrendered their operating licence for the Blackadar Retirement Residence and closed the home on March 1, 2021. The following month, Mr. Hakimi applied to the City of Hamilton to build a nine-storey residential building and townhouses on the property occupied by the nursing home and retirement residence. That application has since expired.

In April, 2022, the Ontario government awarded 112 new beds to Blackadar so that it could build a new 192-bed nursing home in Hamilton, but did not say where in the city the facility would be located.

Mr. Sakhi said in an e-mail that the owners are in the process of exploring their options. He said the “continuing care and well-being” of the residents of Blackadar “is our main and most important concern.”