The niece of a dementia patient who was found dead a week after walking out of a Saanich care home is looking for answers about how he was able to get out of his supposedly secure facility.
Christian Dube, 64, who had advanced dementia, was last seen at 7 p.m. on Nov. 23 at Veterans Memorial Lodge, where he had lived for several months.
Somehow, he was able to make it past three potential barriers and travel roughly 15 kilometres to a Langford trailer park where he was later found dead outdoors of severe hypothermia.
“There’s neglect somewhere there,” said his niece Brittany Dube, 38.
Dube said her uncle should have been blocked by three levels of security — a keypad-controlled locked door on his special unit, an elevator keypad, and a keypad-controlled lock at the front door, an entrance that should be staffed 24/7 but isn’t.
Dube said her uncle first got past the unit-floor keypad. She was told by an administrator that the elevator keypad hasn’t worked in years. And as for the front door, there’s a note above the keypad at the door with the unlock code and instructions written on it. After 4 p.m., the door is not physically guarded.
Dube said she’s been told the lodge is investigating how her uncle got out, and is implementing security measures.
“Well, I want to know what those security measures are,” she said, adding she believes families with a loved one with advanced dementia on floors A1 and A2 and B1 and B2 should know their person might be able to leave the facility.
“They can wheel themselves right out the front door, right — is that safe?”
If a patient is determined and goes undetected, they can follow a visitor or staff member beyond the three barriers, she said.
Dube, who said she’s worked as a care aide most of her career and now works in memory care, said her family was thrilled when her uncle, who was on a wait list for long-term care for about four months, got into one of the most reputable seniors’ care facilities in the region.
In response to her complaints, she said she was told a care home is a residence not a jail, but Dube rejects that argument. “Well my uncle’s in an advanced dementia unit, and that is a jail, and yeah, I want him locked in there, safe.”
Veterans Memorial Lodge, which is run by Broadmead Care, acknowledged that a resident could potentially bypass the unit-floor and front-door keypads.
A spokesperson for the lodge said the elevator keypad is only used to prevent access to the third floor, which is mainly home to services such as food and laundry. The keypad does not prevent a dementia-floor resident from using the elevator to get to the main lobby.
Broadmead Care CEO and president Derrick Bernardo said he’s worked in many provinces and “we’re still the safest environment for seniors to be in.”
Bernardo said he’s not aware of the front-door code and instructions ever being used successfully by a dementia or Alzheimer’s patient, although he agreed the front door is only staffed until 4 or 4:30 p.m. every day for practical and financial reasons.
Bernardo said he and his staff are heartbroken by what happened to Christian Dube.
He said long-term care is not a place where most people expect to spend their lives, and sometimes the desire to return to something more familiar is strong. “If they want to leave the facility, they will find a way and that’s what I’ve learned in my 30 years’ experience of working in the industry,” said Bernardo. “When there’s a will there’s a way.”
Care homes like Veterans Memorial Lodge try to prevent seniors from wandering by offering stimulating and engaging programming and having family bring in familiar items from home for their rooms, he said. That works for some, but some people “just want to go home,” he said.
As for security measures, Bernardo said the facility is looking into how to enhance its current practices and trying out new technologies, including wearable devices to track certain residents. Technology comes with its own challenges, however, especially if residents don’t want to wear a device, said Bernardo, adding keypad doors remain the most important security measure.
Residents at Providence Living at The Views in Comox, which bills itself as Canada’s first public, non-profit facility inspired by the dementia-village concept, wear “discreet” locator pendants or bracelets as part of a Real-Time Locating System that allows staff to locate residents on a digital map and control access to exit points based on each resident’s care plan.
Meanwhile, Dube and her family want the province to consider some sort of Silver Alert to send public notices when high-risk seniors go missing from care homes or family homes.
Seniors advocate Dan Levitt, who held leadership positions in senior-living and long-term care homes in the Lower Mainland and helped shape dementia-friendly care, said it may be time to re-examine the idea of a Silver Alert.
Levitt suggested bringing together advocates, police, the coroner, long-term care home operators, government officials and other experts to “explore some kind of public response and some kind of notification system and what it might look like.”
Levitt said only on rare occasions does a senior make it through several layers of security to wander off from a long-term care home, often with the help of someone else, “and usually we’re able to find them.”
From 2019 to 2021, 361 residents were reported missing from care homes in the province. A study from the seniors advocate for 2021-2022 indicates about 266 seniors went missing out of almost 28,000 people in long-term care, he said.
In an addition to a public-alert system, wearable tracking devices could be used for seniors known to be at high risk for wandering, he said.
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